BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon

The rapprochement of March 2018 between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, now famously referred to as “the handshake”, which kick-started the BBI consultation process and culminated in the Report of the Steering Committee on the Implementation of the Building Bridges to a United Kenya Taskforce Report, is emblematic of the rough-and-tumble that is the country’s tumultuous political history.

The report of the taskforce provided long-awaited principles and recommendations for the construction of “a new Kenyan nation,” including several changes in the current constitution. But a portion of Kenyatta’s Mashujaa Day speech on 20 October 2020 suggests a need for caution. It was rather ahistorical, and unfortunately, oblivious of numerous imposed top-down attempts at constitution-making and other general attempts to foist government declarations or policy documents on ordinary people.

Hoping to, perhaps, prepare the ground for elite-led changes to the 2010 constitution, the president’s speechwriters sought to arrive at this end by using a portion of the speech to remind citizens that constitutions are not static but often change. This process, the writers asserted, should be a product of “constant negotiation and renegotiation of nationhood”, and building a constitutional consensus. The italicized end of the president’s paraphrased speech is instructive, and erroneous in the light of the country’s constitutional history.

Moreover, referring to the Steering Committee’s report, the speech sought to prepare the ground for constitutional and other changes by calling for the building of “a sense of national ethos” that will emphasize belonging and inclusion. This, as the committee rightly observed, must include “documenting our history honestly”. But not so the president as per his speech, notably.

Most historians and citizens would agree that a key element in such an honest history must be factual accuracy regarding past events and interpretations solely based upon such facts. It is this latter point that the speechwriters disregarded in putting forth an account of constitution-making. While correctly emphasizing the need for a constantly moving exercise requiring, again, note, a consensus among political leaders and wananchi, the examples from which they drew during the colonial era demonstrate no such thing. Neither the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954 nor the Lennox- Boyd Constitution (announced in 1957 and implemented in 1958) were the product of a consensus.

First, both constitutions were imposed by the secretaries of state for the colonies after whom they are named, and the terms were dictated by the then governor Sir Evelyn Baring and his advisors—does this ring a bell yet? Elitist. Moreover, the Kenyan population, and particularly Africans, had no input whatsoever in the Lyttleton Constitution, which was imposed even though all six of the Africans appointed to the Legislative Council (LegCo) refused to accept the Lyttleton plan. That plan was not about inclusion at all, but its main purpose was to create a multiracial council of ministers in which, in the early stages of planning, no African would hold a portfolio. Lyttleton eventually agreed for one ministry to be headed by an African, but it ought to be recalled that the constitution provided for three European settler ministers to join the two settlers already holding the important portfolios of finance and agriculture.

Neither the Lyttleton Constitution nor the Lennox-Boyd Constitution were the product of a consensus.

The key group for Lyttleton and the governor in Kenya’s racial politics of the time was thus the European settler politicians. The acceptance of the plan by most of them constituted Lyttleton’s success and left the African population, among whom none could vote for representatives to the Legislative Council, totally excluded. While there was little inclusion, African LegCo members did gain a promise from Lyttleton that the colonial government would take steps to provide for African representation. The promise, imposed without the agreement of settler representatives, led to the first African elections of March 1957. The eight African Elected Members (AEM) immediately launched a campaign for change that would produce a more inclusive constitutional order (European voters elected 14 LegCo members and Asian voters 6).

Amazingly, Kenyatta’s speechwriters cast this as consensual by the statement that if the Lyttleton Constitution “was wrong, it was made right” by the Lennox-Boyd Constitution. This interpretation has no basis in fact as all the European settler members of LegCo opposed the AEM campaign, which included a refusal to accept the two ministerial positions reserved for Africans in 1957. Significantly, most Asian political leaders came to support the AEM demands. Just as in 1954, then Secretary of State Alan Lennox-Boyd, in response to the AEM campaign, flew to Nairobi in late 1957 to implement constitutional changes suggested by Baring. He was prepared to increase the number of AEM in the LegCo and determined to make them accept ministerial portfolios and introduce what came to be known as specially elected members to the LegCo. AEM rejected these proposals, including the six additional LegCo seats for Africans and the creation of a council of state. Convinced he knew best, and that the only views that mattered were those of the European settler population, an infuriated Lennox-Boyd went ahead anyway, giving up his attempt to build consensus and ignoring the opinions of most of the Kenyan population. The result was continued political exclusion, and a period of on-going political tension and racial hostility. The AEM boycott of the Lennox-Boyd innovations (except the six additional LegCo positions) by April 1959 forced the British government to accept that the Lennox-Boyd plan had become unworkable. The solidarity of the AEMs won the battle.

But it was a glaring distortion of history to single out Oginga Odinga, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi, and Masinde Muliro as heroes in the president’s speech while at the same time seeming to say that as AEMs they consented to the changes desired by Lennox-Boyd and Baring. Nothing could be further from historical fact as the archival records of the discussions leading to the Lennox-Boyd Constitution clearly illustrate. Asian political opinion supported the need for constitutional change, but several of the European elected members of LegCo did not favour discussing constitutional changes. The years 1959 and 1960 brought an end to consensus among the settler political elite.

The first Lancaster House constitutional conference (LH1) thus brought together Kenyan LegCo members who viewed constitutional change very differently with few apparent grounds for agreement. While the settlers were divided, the 14 AEM delegates were united in a firm stand in favour of a rapid democratic transition for Kenya leading to self-government and independence within a short period of time. European delegates were, by contrast deeply divided, with the right- wing United Party favouring continued colonial rule and the New Kenya Party (NKP) delegates favouring a gradual transition to independence, and a multiracial executive and parliament with reserved seats for Europeans and fewer for Asians. The new Secretary of State Iain Macleod, like his predecessors, was unable to find or facilitate consensual agreement on a new constitution. Contrary to the claims of the speechwriters, therefore, there was no common ground negotiated among the delegates.

Macleod moved beyond this stalemate by putting a set of proposals before the by-now weary delegates that they were required to accept in full or reject. This was a quite different approach than in 1954 and 1957. Macleod then cleverly manoeuvred the African, Asian, and NKP delegates into acceptance of his terms that went some way toward meeting the demands of African delegates, but not others, for instance, universal suffrage, the appointment of a chief minister, and the release of Jomo Kenyatta. In a real sense, for that reason, the LH1 constitution was an imposed one, and indeed many living in Kenya at the time rejected it.

The 14 AEM delegates were united in a firm stand in favour of a rapid democratic transition for Kenya leading to self-government and independence within a short period of time.

Nonetheless, the AEM accepted it as ending European settler political predominance in Kenya and the new plan as a step on the way to independence. Over subsequent months, however, the consensus that had united the AEM disappeared as bitter divisions developed regarding the type of constitution Kenya should adopt as an independent nation. The competing visions of the two political parties, KANU (a unitary republic) and KADU (majimbo or a federal republic), were difficult to reconcile. This formed the background for the second Lancaster House conference in 1962. The absence of agreement on the basic constitutional structure was clear from the first meeting, and again, a British colonial secretary was forced to impose a settlement that did not take the form of a constitution but of a framework on which a coalition government in Kenya would work out the final document. This took a year and required the British government to draft the self-government constitution and decide key provisions because the KANU and KADU ministers could, well, not agree.

This brief narrative serves to make it clear that there was no consensus here anymore than with the three previous constitutional talks. It is thus, rather puzzling, if not amusing in an odd way that, in a desire to promote negotiated and consensual constitutional innovation under the auspices of the BBI in the year 2020, and by the president no less, these should be the examples put before the Kenyan public in justification. Rather, an accurate account and analysis of earlier or past constitutional innovations demonstrate very clearly the need for wide consultations among the populace (unlike the episodes described above where only a narrowly defined political elite participated) and a broad- based consensus. In other words, the same message can be got across to the public by relating the correct facts. As the speechwriters noted: “The more we ponder our history in its truest form, the more liberated we become.” It is always best to heed the lessons of history, not to ignore it altogether, and repeat the same grievous mistakes.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon Uhuru Kenyatta seems to be Kenya’s least powerful president – at least as suggested by a number of recent developments.

Kenyatta has spent much time and energy during his second term in office defending the basis of his Building Bridges Initiative, otherwise known as the BBI. He has also had to defend his rekindled dalliance with his closest challenger for the presidency in both the 2013 and 2017 elections, Raila Odinga.

Uhuru’s famous March 2018 handshake with Raila is not only wreaking havoc within his own Jubilee Alliance party, but has also made his Mt. Kenya political base restive. The climate of intolerance that he attempted to create – unleashing the security agencies on recalcitrant members of his party – following his détente with the leader of the largest opposition party in parliament, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), seems to not have yielded much for him, after all. Kiambu Woman Representative, Gathoni wa Muchomba, is now the latest supporter from the president’s base to decamp to the Tangatanga movement, the Jubilee wing associated with the Deputy President William Ruto, which has opposed the handshake and the BBI process.

For several months following the handshake, Kenyans grew accustomed to an increasingly irritable and angry president, demanding but not quite able to command full loyalty, especially within his party. The country became used to bitter public diatribes that the president unleashed in his mother tongue, targeted at people who disagreed, or criticised his leadership. Uhuru Kenyatta continues to be on the defensive regarding his under-performing administration and his expensive mega- infrastructure projects. With his party the Jubilee Alliance declared damaged by his deputy president, Uhuru constantly distances himself from what he now describes in public as “politics”.

Now, whenever Uhuru speaks at the launch of various “development” projects, the president is careful not to mention the Big Four Agenda – affordable universal health care, food security, manufacturing and affordable housing – a dim prospect given the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the disastrous economic record that preceded it.

Not only has the judiciary complicated the progress of his BBI plan, but the entire legal fraternity has been up in arms over Uhuru’s decision not to appoint six judges out of a list of 40 that was presented to him over two years ago by the Judicial Service Commission. While the president has insisted that the six judges have outstanding integrity issues — based on information he claims was provided to him by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) — the newly-appointed Chief Justice, Martha Koome, together with her predecessors, David Maraga and Willy Mutunga, have all insisted that the president must appoint the 6 judges or disclose the evidence he claims he has against them.

Since 2013, for Uhuru and members of his administration, the space for making and swiftly implementing public policy has been severely constricted. The requirements for public participation and the involvement of multiple players in the governance process have slowed down the wheels of authoritarian-technocratic rule.

Uhuru’s administration has also had to grapple with constant public criticism, especially when he fails to abide by the law.

Broadly, this is the result of the ramifications of a public language of rights, public participation and consultation, which has been given prominence across the country by the Kenya 2010 constitution.

Limiting the executive branch

While recent analyses and other writings celebrating the 13th May 2021 ruling of the Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court of Kenya in David Ndii and Others vs the Attorney- General and others — widely referred to as the BBI judgement — have been informative and measured, they have elided a crucial understanding of how politics actually works in Kenya.

While focusing on the judgement’s attention to Kenya’s constitutional history since independence, the commentators have glossed over a critical political matrix that underlines Kenya’s constitutional and legal transformation. This is to say that Kenya’s constitutional history did not develop in a vacuum, and that to understand the recent limitations on the powers of the executive, the case for viewing Kenyan politics in the long durée remains compelling.

In her analysis of the judgement, Ambreena Manji highlights the emphasis that the judges, who declared the BBI process unconstitutional, put on Kenya’s constitutional history, arguing that the BBI judgement should be considered historic in two ways: in its elaboration of the basic structure doctrine and in its historical reading of the struggle for constitutional reform in Kenya.

Recent analyses and other writings celebrating the 13th May 2021 ruling of the High Court have elided a crucial understanding of how politics actually works in Kenya.

But the question still remains: why was it possible for Kenyans to bequeath themselves a progressive constitution that limited executive authority in 2010 and not, say, the 1970s, a time of hyper- amendments, and where the “Imperial Presidency” had already emerged?

How then was it possible to write a constitution that seemingly stands against the interests of a political elite whose ideological origins (and for some, biological origins) can be traced to the 1960s, and who were still in power in 2010 and still are? How were Kenyans able to protect the constitution from destruction by the political elite?

Kenya’s constitutional and legal transformation, I argue, is the outcome of Kenya’s own aggressive politics of ethno-regional coalition building, where elites claiming to represent certain ethno- regional communities have become useful in legitimising the political regime.

Put differently, the current transformations in Kenyan politics — where limits can be placed on the extent of the president’s power — are part of the contradictions inherent in the very system of elite domination that historically produced the “Imperial Presidency” under the previous constitution.

Allow me to explain using historical analysis.

The era of elite consensus

As mentioned, the ideological origins (and for some, the biological origins) of Kenya’s current political elite can be traced back to the 1960s.

The power of Kenya’s post-colonial elite to dominate the rest of the population and key sectors of the economy, and to maintain socio-economic inequalities, has best been exemplified when there are high levels of trust amongst the political elite, or essentially, high levels of elite consensus regarding the “rules of the game”.

Following Kenya’s independence in 1963, elite domination rested on the reification of Jomo Kenyatta as Baba wa Taifa (father of the nation), an alliance, or consensus of ethno-regional elites, the demobilisation of opposition forces, and the ability of those elites to reproduce their political and economic power, while precluding fundamental socio-economic reforms.

It was in this context that, from 1964 to 1992 — the year of the return to multi-party politics — the constitution was amended over twenty times. The amendments served to empower the executive branch of the government at the expense of parliament and the judiciary. At the height of this madness (in 1990), the Office of the President (OP) had a staff of 43,230, representing a ratio of 1 in 6 civil servants. The OP became a parallel government, with considerably more executive power than actual ministries. According to the BBI judgement, the constitution had been “stripped of most of its initial democratic and social justice protections” such that the country “had effectively become an authoritarian state.”

The situation was not improved by the fact that Kenya had emerged out of colonial rule with a profoundly unbalanced institutional landscape.

Parliament, political parties and the judiciary were largely underdeveloped compared to the executive and the bureaucracy. For purposes of mobilising the population for development and for political legitimacy, the ruling party — the Kenya African National Union, or KANU — was immediately replaced by the bureaucratic machinery that was directly answerable to the head of state. In fact, it was the provincial administration, answerable to the executive and with a demonstrable capacity to exercise top-down political and administrative control across the country, that was responsible for the maintenance of law and order, keeping the entire population in check, and maintaining the socio-economic inequalities that have been a hallmark in Kenya’s economic trajectory since independence.

Why was it possible for Kenyans to bequeath themselves a progressive constitution that limited executive authority in 2010 and not, say, in the 1970s?

Before the colonial government departed, it ensured that it had demobilised the Mau Mau and left the instruments of power in the hands of elites who would be sympathetic to British interests. This is why, shortly after he became Kenya’s first Prime Minister, Jomo Kenyatta — who had been declared by a colonial governor as “Kenya’s leader unto darkness and death” — rushed to Nakuru to urge white settlers not to leave the country. Inside the smoke-filled room, Kenyatta dismissed recent clamours for the redistribution of land and wealth by many of his supporters as “young blood boiling” that he would soon quell down.

Kenyatta went on to assure his audience – many of whom had been alarmed by the impending independence – that he was a farmer like them, that they had something in common, the subtext suggesting that he was a “responsible” African leader.

These managerial arguments were not a simple placating of white settlers.

By the time Kenyatta was addressing his newly embraced compatriots in Nakuru, the colonial government had already co-opted sympathetic African elites into the bureaucracy, the legislature and the private-property-based economy. A coalition between the executive branch of government, the allies of colonialism, and representatives of global capital thus emerged, and Kenyatta was keen to deepen that arrangement. This also meant that colonial loyalists and representatives of transnational capital would come to reap the full benefits of independence. It was during this time, the late 1950s and early 1960s, that these elites not only took control of the means of production, they also assumed the political and institutional capacity to reproduce their dominance in the decades to come.

In particular, the ability of this alliance to reproduce itself over the years since independence lay in its capacity to demobilise popular forces and progressive movements, especially those elements of the nationalist movement that questioned both the social and economic inequalities of the post- colonial state. The ability to demobilise opposition forces lay in the strength of the bureaucracy that was itself beholden to the elites that had taken over the executive branch in the early 1960s.

Representative institutions, such as parliament and local governments, were downgraded and diminished. Amendments to the constitution made easy, in this context, became a sharp tool in the exercise of authoritarian power. This is why, bequeathed a Westminster-style parliamentary system of government in 1963, Kenya quickly became a republic with an executive president in 1964.

The independence constitution had also made provisions that took considerable power and significant functions of government away from the Nairobi-based executive through a system of eight regional governments of equal status known in Swahili as majimbo. By 1964, the majimbo system had been dismantled.

The ability to demobilise opposition forces lay in the strength of the bureaucracy that was itself beholden to the elites that had taken over the executive branch in the early 1960s.

With majimbo gone, the independence senate lacked rationale, and it too was abolished. Just before this happened, the Kenya African Democratic Union, or KADU, the main supporter of majimbo, had folded, citing frustration from the executive.

By abolishing the regional majimbo governments, and getting rid of the senate, the parliamentary system and the first post-colonial opposition party, the post-colonial elite pact of domination was complete.

The era of elite fragmentation

Daniel Arap Moi — whose political base was outside the central region that had dominated politics since the early 1960s — grew more and more paranoid when he became president in 1978. First and foremost, Moi knew very well that he did not command the respect that Kenyatta had commanded as the founding father, but in addition to this, the resources that Kenyatta relied upon to reward other elites who eventually legitimised his rule became thinner during Moi’s time.

An attempted coup in 1982 poisoned the chalice, and Moi resorted to more strong-armed tactics. He began interfering with elections more brazenly, and eventually surrounded himself with a coterie of loyal political cronies who did not carry much political weight in their own regions.

With the return to multi-party politics in the 1990s, the core that had held together the elite pact of domination during the 1960s and 1970s gave way. This ushered in a period of elite fragmentation, which was combined with the instrumentalisation of ethnicity and violence in the political marketplace.

The situation was not improved by the fact that Kenya emerged out of colonial rule with a profoundly unbalanced institutional landscape.

In an attempt to maintain his grip on power, Moi resuscitated the majimbo idea in the Rift Valley, Western and Coast regions. While the majimbo idea regained prominence in these regions, its ethnically-exclusivist language engendered massive violence that targeted Kikuyu peasants and Luo workers, especially during electoral periods, in an attempt to evict them from these regions.

A brief coalition of Luo and Kikuyu elites in 2002 removed Moi from power. But the next president, Mwai Kibaki, assumed power under Kenya’s former top-heavy constitution, that which had created what we now remember as the “Imperial Presidency”. Kibaki had won the 2002 elections on a platform of constitutional reform, but differences quickly emerged in his coalition — the National Rainbow Alliance, or Narc — regarding what would be the new constitutional order.

The differences revolved around two main questions regarding the structure of government. The first question was: should Kenya adopt a presidential or a parliamentary system? The other question was: what should be the extent of decentralisation?

One of the Narc coalition’s partners, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that was led by Raila Odinga, favoured a parliamentary system, but with a dual executive, that is, a president with a strong prime minister, and extensive provisions for decentralisation, that is, a three-tier system involving eight regions akin to the majimbo system of the 1960s.

The other coalition partner, the National Alliance Party of Kenya, that was led by the then President Mwai Kibaki, favoured a system with a single executive, that is, the president as the primary holder of executive authority, and a modest form of decentralisation, preferably deconcentration.

Kibaki’s group, of course, was in control of the executive branch, and as such, worked to ensure that the Bomas of Kenya draft (named after the venue at which it was deliberated), and which had provided for the system most favoured by Raila Odinga’s faction of the Narc coalition, was altered.

The Bomas deliberations had begun in the twilight years of Moi’s rule and were continued by Kibaki during his first term in office, becoming Kenya’s National Constitutional Conference, a people-led, constitutional review process. However, the draft that was presented at the 2005 constitutional referendum was not the one agreed to at Bomas.

Tampered with by the then legal advisor (the Attorney-general) of the executive branch, Amos Wako, the draft that became known as the “Wako draft” retained a powerful president and watered down the provisions on decentralisation.

Essentially, the “Wako draft” rebuffed the greatest assault on the power of the executive since Kenya gained independence.

As a result, it was defeated by a vote that was mobilised by a new coalition, the Orange Democratic Movement, the ODM, largely led by Raila Odinga, and which was named after the “No” symbol (an orange) of the 2005 plebiscite vote. Kibaki’s government became more and more alienated from the non-Kikuyu public. The seeds of the 2007 post-election violence had been planted.

Birthing the 2010 constitution

The process of elite fragmentation that had begun in earnest during the 1980s and 1990s had exceeded its limitations by 2007. Trust amongst the political elite was at its lowest immediately before and after the 2007-08 post-election violence.

Believing that he was operating in the institutional landscape within which Jomo Kenyatta had operated in the 1960s and 1970s, Kibaki deployed the machinery of the executive to quell opposition protests against his declared victory in the 2007 elections.

The outcome was disastrous.

Over 1,300 lives were lost and more than half a million people were displaced in violence that was sparked by the disputed electoral results.

Without an alliance of elites representing Kenya’s multiple ethno-regional formations backing him up, Kibaki was forced to enter into a deal with Raila Odinga, ODM leader and his challenger during the 2007 elections.

Since trust amongst Kenya’s political elite was at an all-time low, the deal had to be brokered by a foreigner, the late Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, and through it, Raila became Prime Minister in a coalition government with Mwai Kibaki as president.

Important to note – and central to this piece’s argument – is that it was within this context of lack of political trust amongst the political elite — or elite fragmentation, with one side always trying to “fix” the other — that far-reaching constitutional reforms saw the light of day, culminating in the Kenya 2010 constitution.

A marriage of convenience, with mutual suspicion and at times, non-cooperation, became the best description of the operations of the grand coalition government of 2008-2013. In short, the political elite had been forced into a weak alliance following the 2007 post-election violence – nothing to match the strong alliance of elites, and hence, elite domination, that was witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s.

The “Wako draft” rebuffed the greatest assault on the power of the executive since Kenya gained independence.

In addition, the 2007-08 post-election violence meant that the political elite had lost the moral authority to define the future political direction of the country without consulting ordinary citizens. This meant that, inadvertently, the political elite came to share the power to decide the country’s political affairs with civil society organisations and human-rights activists, most of whom were lawyers. These lawyers and activists had also taken part in the then twenty-year popular struggle for a new constitution, a struggle that begun with the re-introduction of multi-party politics in the 1990s.

The lessons and the pain of that struggle informed the strong guardrails that were placed against amendments to the harmonised draft of previous draft constitutional documents, work that was done by a Committee of Experts (CoE) appointed in 2008. At the Great Rift Valley Lodge in Naivasha, the CoE-crafted and harmonised draft was presented to a Parliamentary Select Committee of 14 Party of National Unity (PNU) members, Kibaki’s party, and 13 ODM members, Raila’s party. During the Naivasha proceedings, the PNU side was surprised by ODM’s willingness to relax its demands for a three-tier decentralised system based on eight regions in favour of devolution based on 47 counties; and to let go of the parliamentary system altogether in favour of the presidential system.

The deal that would eventually lead Kenya into a pure presidential system under the 2010 constitution, it was reported, was struck by none other than Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta, the principals of the BBI process eight years later – in a room at the lodge.

A pure presidential system in the sense that, not only would cabinet ministers be appointed from outside parliament, but the losers of the presidential election, no matter how many votes they garnered during an election, would not be accorded any public office. The Naivasha draft, presented to parliament for debate in mid-2010, also scrapped the regional tier of government, and fixed the number of parliamentary constituencies at 290. Given the strong parameters that had been placed by the CoE process to changing the draft in parliament, nothing much changed after that.

Of course, the electoral experience of 2007 had shown both Raila Odinga and William Ruto — the leading ODM politicians at the time — that they too, could ascend to centralised power by becoming president directly through the ballot, and not through control of regional governments, or by having to go through parliament. In light of this, they abandoned the clamour for majimbo and for the parliamentary system.

The proposed 2010 constitution was good to go. The political elite, believing that it would be a useful tool in the waging of their battles for power, did not raise major questions around the structure of the executive and decentralisation. As a result, the 2010 constitution was adopted through a popular vote in a referendum in August 2010, and was promulgated shortly thereafter.

Enter the BBI

The first disappointment, at least for Raila and his supporters, arrived in 2013.

Raila Odinga lost the presidential election by a slight margin under the 2010 constitution to a new (Jubilee) alliance led by Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. This was repeated in 2017, when Raila again lost to Uhuru amidst reports of irregularities during the transmission of results.

Despite his considerable political influence over vast swathes of the country, Raila held no public office between 2013 and 2017. In 2017 he had successfully contested Uhuru’s presidential victory at the Supreme Court and proceeded to boycott a repeat poll, citing lack of a competent and impartial electoral commission.

Two months before the two leaders met and shook hands on the steps of Harambee House, launching the BBI as a result, Raila had also made real his threat to take a symbolic presidential oath in defiance of Uhuru as the “people’s president”.

Meanwhile, 76 people, including ten children, had died during opposition protests by the time Uhuru was sworn in for his second term as president. Pressure from civil society organisations and the international community to find a political settlement was piling. A debt-burdened economy was threatening to stall. Uhuru, like former President Mwai Kibaki before him, was probably worried about tarnishing his own legacy.

It was within this context of lack of political trust amongst the political elite that far- reaching constitutional reforms saw the light of day, culminating in the Kenya 2010 constitution.

It was in this context that the BBI process came about — to create additional positions within the executive so as to accommodate, essentially, more ethno-regional elites that, as Kenyan history has shown, are often useful in legitimising a political regime.

In sum, one could argue that the BBI proposals were, and still are, meant to curb the excessive elite fragmentation that has marked the country’s political history since the 1980s and 1990s in order to produce the elite pact of domination that existed during the 1960s and 1970s.

In fact, before the Constitutional and Human Rights Court complicated the BBI process by declaring it unconstitutional and null and void, the BBI report had yet again tightened control around the presidency. If successful, the president would get to appoint a prime minister from parliament, who will also be the leader of the largest political party or the largest coalition of political parties. The president will also appoint two deputy prime ministers and cabinet ministers drawn from within and outside parliament. The report had also recommended the disbandment of the National Police Service Commission and the creation of a National Police Council to be chaired by a cabinet secretary, that is, a presidential appointee. It had also established the office of an ombudsman within the Judiciary, to be appointed by the president.

As Uhuru Kenyatta and his allies continue to wish for the return to a more “orderly” past, where a few individuals with disproportionate political and administrative power could decide the fate of the entire country, it would be to their advantage to know that that system of elite domination carries inherent contradictions.

The more the political elite expands, the more we shall witness fragmentation within its ranks.

As this piece has shown, at its worst (and as was the case during the post-election violence of 2007-8) elite fragmentation births legal and institutional transformations, such as the 2010 constitution. Put differently, the more the political elite becomes busy fighting amongst itself for resources at the disposal of the state, the more constitutional transformations the country will see.

The more the political elite expands, the more we shall witness fragmentation within its ranks.

In my view, the BBI judgement, the current limitations placed on the president and the executive by the constitution, the restiveness within Uhuru’s political base, and the associated political realignments in the run-up to the next general elections in 2022, should all be understood within this framework.

– This article is part of The Elephant BBI Judgement Series done in collaboration with Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBF), Dialogue and Civic Spaces Programme. Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the HBF.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon

The much-anticipated release of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report two weeks ago was to be the crescendo of the detente—popularly known as the Handshake—between Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta after the failed 2017 presidential election. It underwhelmed.

Soon after its release, the rumor mill put its cost at the very unlikely figure of Sh10 billion, which the pundits calculated to be a whopping Sh64 million for each of the 156 pages of the badly drafted, poorly edited rehash of existing documents. In a satirical column, literary scholar Evan Mwangi calls it a reflection of the “low intellectual capacity of the clowns in charge of our country’s affairs,” while Wandia Njoya, another literary scholar, calls it a declaration of war by the political elite on the people. Both Mwangi’s and Njoya’s reading of the political psychology of the report leads them to a similar conclusion—it is a cynical political fraud.

Mwangi: “The report’s aim is to discourage us from seeking fundamental political or social change by pretending to offer avenues for transformation. It suggests that we should continue assuaging demagogues among our political class, so unlike in 2007 they don’t burn us alive in churches, stoke ethnic violence in political rallies in the run-up to the polls, or organise retaliatory attacks by youths who would then be all snuffed out to cover up crimes against humanity.”

Njoya: “Statements from the government and those pundits that slavishly support it often trace the source of any disaster to the public—especially the victims—and to democracy. Government insiders and supporters portray the state as blameless, and fault Kenyans for wanting to participate democratically in the making of decisions that affect them, because by doing so, Kenyans put delays on the good work of the government. If every social challenge we face is caused by us, the people, then the response to the challenge must be to fix the behaviour, the values and the soul of the people. This “fix the people” approach to social problems is the very essence of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) document released by the government this week.”

A Swahili tabloid summarised BBI thus: “Ni msitu mpya, nyani ni wale wale.” (same monkeys, different forest). From the ivory tower to street level, the verdict is the same.

How did we get here?

In January 2018, three months into the 2017 presidential election standoff, it was rumored that the formation of a government was being delayed by behind-the-scenes power-sharing negotiations. The National Super Alliance (NASA) issued a statement and held a press conference to refute the suggestion, during which this columnist stated that:

“NASA is not interested in boardroom deals which have not delivered for Kenyans like the 2007 power sharing agreement. We don’t recognise this illegitimate government and we will not give it legitimacy . . . Our nation is deeply divided between two irreconcilable political values namely authoritarian rule and democracy. They (Jubilee) have in fact stated that a benevolent dictatorship is better than a democracy. The way out for the country is to embark on an urgent, honest and far reaching conversation sooner rather than later.”

The key words here are “boardroom deals.” Indeed, I recall belabouring the pledge by analogy, stating that NASA would not go into a “come-we-stay” marriage with Jubilee. Internally, we were developing a more elaborate negotiating strategy. Our preferred road map to a political settlement was a transitional government with a limited mandate, to be established by a constitutional instrument along the lines of the National Accord that established the Government of National Unity (GNU) after the 2007/8 failed election.

The transitional government would have spearheaded the process of building a national consensus on political reforms that would have culminated in what we hoped would be an uncontested constitutional amendment referendum, if one were required, followed by a free and fair election. We had also suggested that Uhuru and Raila commit publicly to retiring, so as to strengthen their hand as honest brokers and the midwives of a new political dispensation, and by so doing, insulate the process from succession politics. This was a reasonable proposition since Uhuru would be retiring anyway, and Raila had signed a one-term deal with the NASA co-principals.

Our preferred road map to a political settlement was a transitional government with a limited mandate, to be established by a constitutional instrument

It therefore came as a bit of shock that Raila had gone ahead and cut a backroom deal with Uhuru, the very thing we had pledged not to do. But in the rough and tumble of politics, you learn to roll with the punches. We saw that the letter of the deal was in the spirit of the road map we envisaged, the main difference being that in place of the Jubilee-NASA institutional engagement we had prepared for, the handshake was a commitment by Raila and Uhuru in their personal capacities. In what was to be our last press release as the People’s Assembly Committee, we applauded this commitment but also pointed out the dangers:

“The memorandum is an initiative of the two leaders in their individual capacities. In the memorandum, they describe themselves not as presidents or leaders of political formations which they are, but as friends and compatriots. The two leaders have acknowledged the historical origins of our current crisis, and the many opportunities over the years that leaders have missed to right the ship. They recognise that they too have a historic opportunity to set the country on the right course, and they do not want to be remembered as another generation of leaders that did not rise to the occasion…We must commend and congratulate the two leaders for this meeting of minds. Acknowledging a problem is the first step towards solving it. The two leaders have asked us to give them an opportunity to spearhead this process. We have been assured that this initiative will be about the people, will involve the people, and will be validated and owned by the people. But we are alive to the painful history of political betrayal. We know that once [crises] subside, leaders can get comfortable and allow the issues of the people to fade into the background. That is how we have ended up where we are.”

This was the spirit as we set about implementing the handshake. But as days went by, it became evident that what was said was not what was intended. The discordance was brought into sharp relief by disagreements on whether or not to gazette the BBI Task Force. The handshake MOU was explicit that the initiative was a personal political undertaking. Gazetting the task force would make it a state project that would be bureaucratised and watered down. And as one colleague opined, it would amount to “kicking the ball into the long grass.” Those pushing for gazettement could not argue a cogent case, but in one conversation, one colleague, in a fit of exasperation, blurted out: “But there is money!”. The cat was out of the bag.

In the corridors, the conversation was dominated by talk of an impending cabinet reshuffle. Indeed, within no time at all, Raila Odinga’s Capitol Hill office had become a beehive of activity with, so I gathered, people bringing their CVs, others seeking help with tenders, pending bills and corruption cases. By end April, the frenzy had reached fever pitch. Week after week, confident predictions were made that the reshuffle would be announced on Thursday, then Monday, then Thursday again. My vehement protestations about these under-the-table dealings elicited a quiet word of advice that I should tone down as my name was on the appointments list.

We had also suggested that Uhuru and Raila commit publicly to retiring, so as to strengthen their hand as honest brokers and the midwives of a new political dispensation There were two other issues that I found troublesome. The first was the anti-corruption crusade that was mounted immediately after the handshake. My concern was that corruption cartels were the last adversary that the BBI needed, especially as it appeared to be a one-sided assault on Deputy President Ruto’s patronage network. Secondly, I was persuaded that the country was headed into an economic crisis (that is now unfolding). By embracing Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga was in essence sanitising Jubilee’s economic delinquency, and jumping into a sinking ship. In fact, I postulated that by the time of his departure from office, Uhuru Kenyatta would be more unpopular than Moi was in 2002.

Raila dismissed both concerns. I was particularly bemused by his prognosis that an economic crisis would not hurt because Zimbabwe’s Mugabe seemed to have survived a much more severe one (Mugabe was still in office then). It was not long before it became apparent that an economic storm was brewing and an urgent discussion was convened. At the end of my presentation, Raila came back with what to me was a bolt from the blue: he wanted to know how the president could be helped and went as far as to request that I write a paper that he would discuss with Kenyatta. That is the moment it dawned on me that, in his mind, Raila was already in government, or, as we say in Swahili, tumewachwa kwa mataa (we had been abandoned at the traffic lights). I did not respond and needless to say, no such paper was forthcoming. Looking back, Kenyatta had all along been banking on a personal deal with Raila. Two anecdotes will suffice to illustrate the point—they are by no means the only ones.

On the eve of the declaration of the official results of the August 8 presidential election, the NASA presidential campaign team was holding a quiet vigil of sorts when a muted drama, that went unnoticed by most of the people in the room, played out. A wheeler-dealer known to have business links with the Kenyatta family walked up to Raila and said that “mama is waiting.” Although spoken in low tones, colleagues within earshot became curious and sought to know who “mama” was. The awkward silence that ensued gave the game away. A statement unequivocally rejecting the election results was quickly drafted for Raila to issue; it had not been on the evening’s agenda. It is unlikely that we will ever know whether Raila was in on the plan to meet “mama” and what the rendezvous would have engendered. History oftentimes turns on chance.

The second one was in late November, shortly after we launched the protest movements that included a consumer boycott of Brookside Dairy products, among others. I received a call from a colleague alerting me that he had directed to me a “foreign journalist” who was frantically looking for Ida Odinga (she was out of the country at the time). The name of the “foreign journalist” was Christina Pratt (née Kenyatta). It would seem Ms. Pratt had presumed name recognition as she did not see fit to introduce herself or give her reason for calling and so, not recognising the name, my colleague had brushed her off for a couple of days; he responded once I told him who the caller was. Such was the urgency that Ms. Pratt even sought to know whether she could travel to where Ida Odinga then was, which proposal was declined. I gather that contact was eventually made and a home visit, of the kind we call itega in Gikuyu (gift giving), was arranged.

As observed, the point of these anecdotes is that Kenyatta had been banking on resolving the election impasse privately with Odinga, kinyumbani (domestically) as we say in Swahili; the handshake was the actualisation of Kenyatta’s desire. But by having chosen to personalise a political crisis, Uhuru and Raila would seem to have overestimated their personal power and underestimated their adversaries.

Uhuru and Raila seemed not to realise that refusing to categorically rule themselves out of the 2022 contest was guaranteed to frame the BBI initiative as succession politics. It did not help that the anti-graft war was increasingly being perceived as a political takedown of William Ruto. Economic hardship also began to bite, making the ground less than enthusiastic, particularly in Kenyatta’s central Kenya political base. Raila’s contention, as cocky as it was self-serving, that Kenyatta’s political clout would shrug off the economic distress has not aged well. Week after week, no sooner would the joint nationwide meet-the-people engagements they had promised be announced but they would fizzle out.

The BBI Report is the product of these missteps. What many Kenyans will not know is that the BBI task force was not constituted to produce a technical report. Rather, it was initially envisaged as a team of political advisors to the two principals, in line with the principals’ commitment that they would be personally leading the engagements with the people. It would seem that once the ground became hostile, the task force was repurposed to collect views and write a report—a task that it was clearly neither suited for nor prepared for. Suffice it to say that, given the depth and wealth of talent and experience in governance reform that we have gained in our two-decade constitutional reform struggle, the BBI task force is not in the country’s first or even second eleven.

Uhuru and Raila seemed not to realise that refusing to categorically rule themselves out of the 2022 contest was guaranteed to frame the BBI initiative as succession politics

In the midst of the debate about the flaws of the report, we risk losing sight of the fact that the handshake was a product of a failed presidential election. The real problem is one of incumbents who, sensing defeat, monkey-wrench the election to the point where it is impossible to get an outcome. Without a clear outcome, a power-sharing settlement is negotiated and the incumbent gets to stay in power. This model of retaining power was invented by the Mwai Kibaki administration in 2007 and has quickly gained currency, being copied in Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Togo to name a few countries.

How does the BBI report propose to end this? It makes no mention of the problem, let alone offering proposals; there is, in fact, no mention of free and fair elections in the entire report. There is perhaps no greater indictment of the handshake than the fact that we are now hurtling towards another toxic, high-octane, do-or-die election. Had Uhuru and Raila stuck to the path of honest brokers committed to midwifing the new political dispensation that they had promised instead of the political intrigues and self-aggrandisement that we are now witnessing, things on the ground could have been very different.

A while back, this columnist enumerated four critical historical junctures at which nation-building opportunities were squandered through a failure of leadership. Make that five.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon

It finally docked on our shores, the shores of the Nam Lolwe, on the 6th of June 2019. Unlike the old steamer, MV Alestes, it blew no loud horn to announce its arrival at the port of Kisumu to tell all within the vicinity to steer clear of the waterway and berth. Rather, it glided smoothly into Kisumu City at the end of a financial year, when government departments hurry to close the books. It creeped up on the residents of the city, stealthily like a crocodile. The 35th of the expected 47 Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) “public consultation” meetings was upon us.

“I got a call from the County Commissioners about a month ago. Something like this cannot be done through an open invitation. The whole of Kisumu would have been here,” said a young man with a chuckle, his face beaming with mischief, the smirk of someone proud of his high connections and who had been let into a well-kept siri-kali. We were queuing for tea and snacks at the Acacia hotel, Kisumu’s high-end hotel where the BBI commissioners were holding a “consultation” meeting on how to build a new Kenya.

I, too, would have missed the meeting, had I not seen in good time a WhatsApp message from a friend who’s a Kisumu government insider. The message had been sent in the wee hours of the morning that Thursday. In keeping with the rising personality cults of Kenya’s county governors, and their penchant for frivolous publicity, the e-invitation card I got bore Professor Anyang’ Nyongo’s picture, smiling, donning a white shirt and a red necktie, and holding a jacket flung over his left shoulder, held tenderly by his index finger. Warwakou duto! (All are welcome!), said the e-card.

As we sat down for tea and snacks, a clergyman wearing a white flowing robe and a red scalp cap (signifying his high position in the one of the many African-instituted Christian churches in Western Kenya) said, “I wouldn’t have known who sent me the money. I got am M-Pesa transfer of 2,028 shillings from a Samuel Otieno but I couldn’t tell who that is until the lady spoke.”

That lady he was referring to was an amiable and handsome woman dressed in a white, loose-fitting linen suit who had spoken towards the end of the meeting, shortly before the closing prayer – the ubiquitous Christian prayer that has become mandatory at public events, which always reminds one that many Kenyans, especially state and public officers, are yet to come to terms with the 2010 Constitution of Kenya, even with the shortest of its articles, Article 8, that states that “there shall be no State religion”. She told the officially invited participants that “if you check your phones, M-pesa imeingia [the Sh2000 transport refund] plus Sh28 ya kuitoa. Usikuje kama ulikua na Fuliza, the money has been chewed.”

The BBI task force is run like a tight deep state ship. But there is nothing transparent or charming about its process of public consultations. Unlike the recent commissions, whose meetings and deliberations were widely publicised, the BBI meetings are carefully and secretly organised, and their deliberations are hardly made public through the radio or the daily newspapers.

BBI has neither a known physical address nor a web page. Nor an expressly parliament-sanctioned legal existence and a budget line. It has an email address only. It works mostly as a sad reminder that despite its enormous constitutional powers, the Kenyan Parliament is yet to exercise effective control over the Office of the President, especially over the conduct of the provincial administration in midwifing political transitions such as the BBI and its latest women-only “popular movement” wing, Team Embrace.

The BBI task force is run like a tight deep state ship…The BBI meetings are carefully and secretly organised, and their deliberations are hardly made public through the radio or the daily newspapers.

Although the activities of the BBI have largely escaped or studiously evaded public scrutiny, the Kisumu event gives us a glimpse into how it works. Its consultative forum was surreal. It had a creepy feeling of an odd combination of a typical District Commissioner-organised public holiday event – with all its attendant display of anxieties over the security of the VIP and crowd control – and a typical NGO seminar at a five-star hotel, but with neither the benefits of a skilled moderator nor an appropriate teaching methodology of getting the best out of the competing and conflicting views of the representative of the various groups present at the meeting.

It was an eerily odd public event. Like a typical District or Provincial Commissioner-organised event, it drew in government officials and civil servants, including the starched khaki, big silver button, crimson red epaulets, and stick-wielding types, such as high-ranking police officers and provincial administrators, who patrolled the corridors of the hotel. While the presence of baton-wielding Administration Police officers at an open-field public event, in jungle-green camouflage uniforms, standing strategically in front of a crowd of spectators, and policing the imaginary wall between the seated and sheltered elite and the sweating crowd conveyed a sense of security and control, the conspicuous presence of the AP officers armed with the G-3 rifles or AK-47 rifles sent a chill down one’s spine. It evoked anxiety and fear rather than security and safety, which were amplified by the antics of an order-obsessed deputy county commander who wore a chocolate brown suit and stood like a sentry at the entrance of the second door to the conference room, alternately keeping an eye on the goings-on along the corridor and in the conference room.

Unlike a typical NGO forum, there were has no hand-written sign up sheets; the organisers simply ticked off the names of the participants on a printed list of invited participants, each sheet bearing the names of only the invited participants from each of the sub-counties of Kisumu County. Luckily, the uninvited (those not vetted by the Provincial Administration) could also walk into the meeting and listen to the proceeding, without signing up.

But like a typical NGO or government event, the meeting was adorned with big banners, which, despite promising dialogue or debate, served more to mark the boundary between the powerful commissioners’ high table and the jam-packed seminar room than to remind the commissioners of their vision and mission. Pleasantly, a female Kenyan sign language interpreter was hard at work, diligently translating the proceedings of the meeting.

The commissioners took turns to frame the problem, to ask questions, and to offer solutions and ways-forward, slicing up their audience into several categories: geographical, generational, gender, political, minority, and disability, soliciting from each participant, a solution for the evils bedeviling Kenya but barely giving the participants a chance to compose their thoughts or debate many contentious views vying for attention.

Nearly all the participants – except the governor, a Member of Parliament (Oduma Awour) and a former Member of Parliament (Prof Ayiecho Olweny) – were given less than three minutes to talk about items on the 9-item agenda, which prompted Father Samuel of the Catholic Peace and Justice Commission to say, “If the we want BBI to succeed, we need to allow people to freely express themselves, not shut down.” But the Commission did not heed to his plea. “We know what has happened, we need the solution. This is not the right forum for venting,” Prof. Oloo Adams responded curtly.

Except for Dr Florence Omosa’s very brief experiment with the Socratic approach, which questioned, teased out the inconsistencies and tested the appropriateness of a solutions offered by the participants, most of the commissioners found a ready-made formula for the classification of problems bedeviling Kenya by categorising them into neat labels: gender, age, geography, and social exclusion (including disability). Their idea of “participation” was to have a member from each category speak about their issues, as if the problem facing them was defined purely by their gender, age, geographical location, or level of social exclusion. Diversity, when in the hands of the securocrats and the commissioners, was reduced to a convenient tool of bureaucracy, generating more controversies than debate.

In a welcome break with the previous briskly sessions, Dr Omosa intoned politely and firmly, “Why do we fight during elections? We don’t trust each other, what should we do so that life goes on? What must happen so that we don’t have so many baby Pendos? Give me specific recommendations.” Their idea of “participation” was to have a member from each category speak about their issues, as if the problem facing them was defined purely by their gender, age, geographical location, or level of social exclusion.

Not satisfied with the quick, not-well-thought-out responses, Dr Omosa observed, “I know, it’s not meant to be a dialogue, but I must ask you, how can the elders be the solution [to divisive elections], yet they champion exclusive ethnic leadership?” She was responding to a participant’s suggestion that a greater role for community elders in the management of elections is the solution to the tensions Kenyans experience in general elections. “Disband the IEBC [Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission],” opined another participant.

Instead of a facilitating dialogue and debate, the meeting became a forum for contentious hard line views: “Kenya should go for a parliamentary system of government,” said one participant. “The constitution of Kenya has turned Kenya into a killing field,” asserted another. “Bring back the death sentence; let the murderers be locked without bail.” “Arrest and lock up the corrupt without bail,” Prof. Ayiecho Olweny, a former Member of Parliament, pleaded passionately. “We want “Luo kit gi Timbegi” brought back to in our curriculum,” said one participant. “Send the children back home to learn Dholuo,” said another. Ms Grace Jowi Jobita from Muhoroni, paraphrasing the Bible, stated, “If it is your eye that’s causing you a problem, my first recommendation is, let them be castrated, second, let them be castrated, and third, let them be castrated.”

There was also a call to “review the social ethics and education curriculum” in order to address the dearth of ethics among Kenyan youth and the rising cases of violence against women, including rampant cases of rape and defilement. “Amend the Chief’s Act. Our society is yearning for the past order, and is uncomfortable with the recent changes,” said retired Paramount Chief Paul Odero.

Mr Mathews Owili, the Kisumu County’s deputy governor, concurred with Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o that Kenya needs a parliamentary system of government, but also asked, “If the Prime Minister can be compelled by law to form a government that reflects the face of Kenya, can the Prime Minister be compelled to treat all Kenyans as equals?”

Struck by the repeated demands for more laws that would ensure diversity in public appointments, especially at the top levels of Kenya’s state power, Senator Amos Wako, the former long-serving Attorney General, pointed out, “The law already provides for that…the constitution makes reference to the face of Kenya in more than 22 Articles. What I want is, how can we ensure that the law, the constitution is respected by whomever?”

“The problem may not be Chapter Six [on leadership and integrity], but the law to enable, enforce the chapter. Perhaps the law enacted to enable this chapter does not reflect the letter and the spirit of the constitution of Kenya, 2010,” added Senator Wako.

However, BBI commissioners stuck to their nine-point agenda, briskly running through each item on their tick-off list, even when the more discerning participants, such as Senator Amos Wako, sensed that the problem might not be more laws, as some were suggesting, but a more complicated political process i.e. the lack of good laws and constitutionalism.

Anxious that this meeting might not yield much, Sheikh Masoud pointed out that “Kikao bila matunda ni ufisadi,” cautioning both the commissioners and the participants at the meeting that if the BBI initiative, like past initiatives such as the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), yields nothing, then the participants at BBI public consultation meetings would be complicit in yet another act of corruption. The TJRC report is silent on or whitewashes some critical aspects of Kenya’s evil past. For example, Volume 11 of the TJRC report airbrushes the 1969 Kisumu massacre out of Kenya’s register of post- independence political massacres. The BBI too looks like yet another lost opportunity to revisit Kenya’s evil past and exorcise the ghosts that haunt Kenya’s post-independence politics.

Sheikh Masoud pointed out that “Kikao bila matunda ni ufisadi,” cautioning both the commissioners and the participants at the meeting that if the BBI initiative…yields nothing, then the participants at BBI public consultation meetings would be complicit in yet another act of corruption.

The BBI’s is a lost cause because it embodies the worst carry-overs from the undemocratic provincial administration’s coercive and manipulative tendencies while pretending to promote progressive and inclusive practices. The BBI seems yet another lost opportunity because the elite have set its course, and are championing narrow, selfish and convenient political causes that hardly go deep enough into the roots of the knotty questions of justice many Kenyans yearn for, and which were not given a fair hearing at the Kisumu forum.

Boniface Akach, a Kondele-based front-line human rights activist, who only learnt of the BBI meeting accidentally while attending a “solidarity” meeting at the same hotel, wrote the following on his Facebook account: “The on-going public participation exercise by BBI is a mockery, a waste of public resources and a rubber-stamping exercise. How can such a public exercise be taken to the Acacia Hotel, a five-star rated hotel, despite other more conducive and accessible spaces being available? The invite-only event is so restricted, with NIS and Police all over. The mobilisation across sub- counties is so well designed apart from Kisumu Central (wajuaji). Mobilisation was strictly done by the Kisumu County Commissioner. But we are not surprised, we all know that the aim the referendum is meant to settle scores as it creates opportunity for recycled, rejected political friends.”

Perhaps, as Akach points out, the perfunctory public consultation meetings, like the one held in Kisumu County, are merely an alibi for a pre-determined political course and cause. In Kisumu, there was a clear divide between the demands made by the ODM elite, on the one hand, and popular demands by the people of Kisumu County, on the other.

According to Kisumu County Governor Prof. Anyang’ Nyong’o and the ODM branch leaders, what’s at stake is a referendum to turn Kenya into a proper parliamentary system of government. However, to others, it’s the unfinished business of political violence and justice for the victims of political violence.

“We want inclusivity in compensation. We lost lives in 2007 and again in 2017. Some people were compensated, but not people from this region. We need inclusive compensation for people like baby Pendo,” said Victor Nyasaya. A representative of the National IDP network also expressed a similar concern. “The 2007 IDPs in Kisumu were paid only three thousand shillings, unlike those from Nakuru who were paid ten thousand shillings,” he lamented.

In many ways, the BBI “consultation” made a mockery of the constitution-sanctioned idea of public participation, a realisation that was not lost on many of the participants attending the Kisumu forum. It was a charade. Melania Jackie, representing the youth, lamented, “We were are not involved in the process of formulating public policies. Not the Universal Health Care, not the Huduma Number, we were only given deadlines. No civic education. We don’t have a youth on the BBI high table, even a token of representation. “Na tuna ambiwa hii sio baraza,” Mitchelle Otieno lamented on Facebook, adding that “the BBI team ought to have held the meeting in Kondele and not Acacia hotel. We lost lives in Kondele, Nyalenda, Manyatta, and not Acacia.”

Orengo Ben Wamaya, who represented Bunge la Mwananchi at the meeting, thundered, “Public participation is never done in a five-star hotel.”

If the TJRC report offers the residents of Kisumu an official amnesia for the 1969 massacre in exchange for the recognition of the years of economic marginalisation which followed it, then what will the BBI report yield? Will it offer restorative justice or compensations for lost life, limb and property to the recent victims of political violence? Who will foot the bill? The perpetrators and the principal beneficiaries of political violence now occupying high offices or the Kenyan taxpayers yet again? Will it be sufficient and equitable? Will there be yet another opportunity for a trade-off between some measures of restorative justice and political support for a new political coalition, like the Uhuruto 2013 bargain? Will it offer retributive justice? Will it recommend memorialisation of the victims of past political evils or yet again endorse a tacit collective amnesia and unofficial amnesty for the perpetrators and principal beneficiaries of the past political evils?

Who decides?

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon “The Luo community is happy Raila is back at the centre,” intoned our physician friend, Dr Sam Owino. In the last twelve months, since the surprise political rapprochement between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his antagonist-in-chief Raila Odinga, the talk about town has been how the Luos are now reaping from the so-called “Handshake”. “We’re no longer the political bogeyman of the state,” reiterated the Nairobi physician. “It has never been fun carrying the tag and burden of oppositional politics in the country for all these years.”

After the Handshake, which had been preceded by a piercing palpable tension across the country, Raila, the leader of the nascent opposition outfit, the National Super Alliance (NASA), broke ranks with his colleagues Kalonzo Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetangula to sue for peace with President Uhuru of the Jubilee Party. “Koro wan eisirkal,” (We’re now in government…we’re no longer in the opposition) said Raila soon after the Handshake, a statement that was reiterated by President Uhuru. A visitor to the country soon after the combustible double elections would never appreciate and digest fully the import of that statement.

To a section of the Luo community, “being in the political cold,” is a phrase they identify with all too well. “The Luo people have been in the opposition effectively since 1966, when President Jomo Kenyatta shunted his Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga,” said Bernard Oduor, an advertising and marketing manager of a Nairobi-based publishing company. “Let another community shoulder the weight of being always on the receiving end of the state’s anti-development brutal policies and constant violence.”

No community in Kenya has borne the brunt of the state’s political malice and economic sabotage than the Luo people, observed Oduor. “The Luo people have suffered the greatest political harassment and assassinations in this country, starting with Argwings Kodhek, who was killed in January 1969. Six months later, Tom Mboya, perhaps the greatest of Luo leaders, was killed, possibly by the same forces that took care of Kodhek through a freak accident.”

That same year, 1969, the government detained Jaramogi with other Luo leaders for standing up to Jomo and the Kiambu Mafia’s imperial tendencies, recalls Oduor. “It was a cruel testament of the political harassment by the successive government of Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi that by the time multipartyism was being re-introduced in Kenya, in 1991, Jaramogi was already frail, old and sickly.” A multiparty election was held in December 1992 and Jaramogi was elected the MP for Bondo. A year later, on January 20, 1994, Jaramogi was dead.

From 1963 to 1978, Kenya had been a de facto one party state. But in 1982, just before the attempted military putsch led by Kenya Air Force officers on August 1, 1982, the country become a de jure one party state, after Jaramogi and George Anyona, the firebrand politician from Gusiiland, walked to the registrar’s office at Sheria House and demanded to register their party – the Kenya African Socialist Alliance (KASA). Feeling threatened by the duo’s courage and determination to register a new party, one afternoon Moi summoned MPs and asked them to change the constitution to make Kenya a one-party dictatorship.

“Even though Robert Ouko, the brilliant foreign affairs minister, worked for the Kanu government and was a loyal lieutenant of Moi, they still got rid of him, proving that no Luo politician was good enough for a Kenyan government,” opined Oduor. “It has been a tortuous long journey and it’s time we enjoyed some respite.”

Broken promises

In the aftermath of a contested August 8, 2017 election and the subsequent boycott of the second presidential election on October 26, 2017, the state visited violence on members of the Luo community in Nairobi County, and especially in the lakeside town of Kisumu, which is perceived as a base for the Luo community. In both cities, hordes of youth from the ghetto suburbs of Kibera and Mathare in Nairobi and Nyalenda and Kondele in Kisumu rioted, protesting the gross mismanagement of the election procedure. Many of the youth who were felled by the bullets of state security personnel were Luo youth.

“The Handshake was meant to cool the political temperatures, which were threatening to soar overboard,” said Steve Ochuodho, a researcher in African history. “It was to allow for the country to go back to its normal self and stabilise, with the aim of the country hopefully taking off economically. True, the country stabilised, but nothing much has really happened thereafter.”

“Contrary to popular belief being peddled by ‘Raila evangelists’ that the Luos are now in government, nothing could be further from the truth,” noted Ochuodho. “Luos aren’t in the government and more than ever before, they are languishing in poverty. I fret every time I hear that Luos are now enjoying and I ask: Which Luos are these? If there are any Luos in government, they must be Raila’s friends or his relatives from Siaya County,” added the researcher.

The promises that Raila made after the Handshake, ostensibly to the Luo community, are nothing new, explained Ochuodho: “They are the same promises Raila has been making since 1997 when he merged his fledging National Democratic Party (NDP) with Kanu. Since then, it is the Odinga family that has continually grown rich at the expense of the Luo people. Because of these Raila Handshakes, the Luo people are treated as the Odinga family’s captives to be traded with politically any time the family wants to reap financially from the existing government.”

“There are no deliverables, neither are there fruits to be harvested from the Handshake,” said Ochuodho. “All what we are hearing is what it intends to do, It is classic political brinkmanship.” All what the Handshake has done is to entrench even further retrogressive leadership in Luo Nyanza.”

“Through the Handshake, Cyprian Awiti, the Homa Bay governor, came back. Every Luo voter, wherever he or she was, knew Awiti was never going to survive a by-election if the court upheld the petition.” Former Kasipul MP Oyugi Magwanga had successively petitioned both the High Court and the Court of Appeal, only for the Supreme Court to uphold his election victory in August 8, 2017.

With the coming by-election in Ugenya, Raila has already told the voters ahead of time that they should not let him down – that they should return Christopher Karan, who the court found had engaged in electoral malpractices, pointed out Ochuodho. “Kik ukuod wiya jothurwa, (Please don’t embarrass me), Raila told the voters when he went there recently. Even though Karan is unpopular, the ODM party still gave him a direct ticket.” David Ouma Ochieng, Karan’s chief opponent and the immediate former MP, whose petition was heard by the High Court in Kisumu, will be mounting a soap box when the by-election comes up on April 5, 2019.

“The Luo people were not ready for the Handshake,” said Mike Osilo, an information technologist in Nairobi. “Because they were ready for war. The state’s unceasing violence against the Luo people had created in them an appetite for unstoppable bloodshed. They were prepared to go the whole hog.”

Osilo said this hardline stance had been fomented during the October 26 fresh presidential elections when elections did not take place in four Nyanza counties (Homa Bay, Kisumu, Migori and Siaya). “For the first in the history of post-independent Kenya, a people had successively held back a state with all its militarised violence. From then on, the people decided there was no turning back and then the Handshake happened.”

“The Building the Bridges Initiative, the result of the Handshake, has now become a parastatal,” quipped Osilo. “It was meant to give jobs to the favoured boys. Everything is business as usual. If the Handshake and its appendage, the BBI, was serious in developing Luo Nyanza, it would have started by reviving Ahero Irrigation Scheme and the Chemilil, Muhoroni and Sony sugar factories…”

Osilo said Raila’s Handshake compensation promise to the families that lost their relatives in the last election, especially in Kisumu, has remained just that: a promise. “Immediately after the Handshake, Raila went down to Kondele, the site of the greatest state violence visited on a people. Scores of youth were killed by the GSU and Raila that night told their families that the government was going to compensate them. The people were in a very uncompromising mood, but Raila managed to calm them down. Twelve months later, there is nothing to show for that promise.”

“Let it be on record: The much talked about dredging vessel brought to Lake Victoria actually preceded the Handshake – Raila just hijacked its launching on January 19, 2019. Likewise, the ongoing resuscitation of the Kenya Breweries Limited plant in Kisumu is not a product of the Handshake: KBL had already given the farmers the go-ahead [before the Handshake took place] to start sowing sorghum. As for the ferry transport on Lake Victoria, the World Bank had already mapped the lake for its Lake Victoria Transport programme as far back as 2016,” noted Osilo.

“One year down the line, the Handshake had become a forum for exchanging insults,” said Ochuodho. “Those who used Ruto to thrust a poisoned dagger into Raila’s back are the same people who are now are using him to stab Ruto in the back.” In Ochuodho’s view, “Canaan had become a mirage”, whose climax was deporting Joshua Miguna Miguna, a deportation Ochuodho squarely blames Raila for. “I can tell you this, the Handshake will not last – it will soon collapse, and after it collapses, Raila will walk away in shame, this time accompanied by old age.” The referendum which is supposed to be the outcome of BBI is “already poisoned,” summed up Ochuodho.

No bridges built in Kisumu

In the lakeshore Kisumu city, the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI)’s first anniversary went unnoticed. The residents we interviewed were resolute that the Handshake was still a puzzle and shrouded in mystery. Hence, the rapprochement means different things to different people. One year after it took place, it still dominates public discussions, eliciting more questions than answers.

“Did the Handshake simply substitute Luo-Kalenjin elite rivalry with the Luo-Gikuyu elite one? Are the Gikuyu elite now holding the ring between Raila Odinga and William Ruto? Who really is our enemy?” posed a middle-aged man at the Bunge la Wananchi (Peoples’ Parliament) meeting taking place under the huge canopy of an oak-like tree off the Kisumu-Kampala Road where real politik is earnestly and hotly debated during the lunch break.

For some of Kisumu’s residents, what the Handshake has succeeded in doing is resuscitate puzzling questions that revolve around Raila’s political deftness and survival instincts. “Raila’s an avid football fan and right now he has the ball…will he, this time just get away with a high ball against William Ruto? If he does, will Ruto, stand between him and the goal? Or, will he this time finally score the winning goal, now that the referees of the presidential tourney seems to be on his side?” mused Willis Ochieng. “Ruto is not a leader, he’s a dealer. There’s no doubt he would be bad for the country – he’s unsympathetic to the feelings of the people. But that aside, the big question that has been disturbing us is, just what is in it for the rest of the spectator crowd?

At the Kondele highway interchange, we met Shem Matiku, a cobbler who plies his trade below the interchange. Kondele was the site of fierce battles between the battle-hardened youth of the sprawling ghetto, who fought back the paramilitary police, the General Service Unit (GSU) in August 2017 after the first presidential election. Matiku had since put that terrible period behind him: “I’m an optimist. I believe Raila has the best interests of his people. Uhuru, unlike Ruto is not a hardliner, he could be a hard bargainer, but a bargainer nonetheless and that is why he made a pact with Raila.”

“Ruto’s too forceful,” reflected Matiku, in between shining his customers’ shoes. “It is as if he’s forcing the people to elect him: it’s either his way or the highway.” The cobbler observed that until Raila went into government, development in Luo Nyanza was lopsided. “Now we’re beginning to see some development our way: Kenya Breweries has reopened its factory and construction of roads has commenced and corruption is being fought…you know what…Raila helped Uhuru see state corruption in the government. Let the spirit of the Handshake flow. We support it one hundred percent.”

However, George Collins Owour, an astute civil society leader, is utterly unimpressed by the Handshake. “We wanted to put up a monument in honour of the victims of political violence, preferably at the Jomo Kenyatta sports ground and have Raila Odinga launch it,” said Owuor. “A monument that would tell the story of the victims of political violence, and a constant reminder to the youth of the dangers of political violence, while at the same time establishing a link between poverty and politics. The monument had been also intended to occupy a space for discussing political violence and how it distracts and destroys lives of many unhinged youth. It would remind them of the dangers of disorganised and unhelpful protests and thereby discourage them from participating in them.”

“The youth are always ready to participate in protests, but where are they now? Some were killed and maimed, others were arrested and falsely accused of robbery with violence and are now languishing in jail, having been forgotten,” lamented Owuor. “The irony is that the county government of Kisumu, while rejecting our proposal, was quick to fast track its own plans of erecting a statue in memory of Jaramogi Odinga.”

“Jaramogi initiated the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation, which inspired small- and medium-scale business initiatives in Nyanza region. As a social democrat, Jaramogi also led popular grassroots movements for political and cultural awareness in the whole of East Africa,” said Prof Anyang Nyong’o, the Governor of Kisumu.

While the contribution of Jaramogi among the Luo community is in no doubt and cannot be contested, whether in Luo Nyanza or, indeed the entire country, to seemingly bury the history of the youth, who have paid with their lives for fighting for democracy, is callous and deceitful, bemoaned Owuor. “Let us not kid ourselves – the Handshake has not worked for the youth: the boda bodas (motor cycle riders), street vendors and hawkers are still suffering – some lost their lives, others are today living with live bullets in their bodies. Nobody talks about their plight and President Uhuru and Raila have largely forgotten about them.”

Owuor said it would be pretentious to build bridges when the youth have been neglected. “The youth had been promised Canaan. Instead what they got was a Handshake between two political bigwigs who cared for nothing as far as the youth were concerned. Because of this, Raila cannot hold a rally in Kisumu – the youth are still very embittered.”

The divided opinion of Kisumu residents suggested that the Handshake was a self- preservation elite pact. Raila’s core political constituents, still hurting and nursing post- presidential election injuries and injustices since 2007, and suffering biting hunger pangs in these economic hard times, have been forced, yet again, to defer their quest for justice and reparations.

The civil society leader said BBI was a reward for the boys. “I’ve been seeing them in seminars taking selfies, and we’ve yet to see a preliminary report of its findings. If BBI was working, we wouldn’t have heard the kind of political rhetoric and bitterness we witnessed at the Kirinyaga governors’ conference. Truth be told, BBI has been overtaken by events…stupid…succession politics is the order of the day.”

The divided opinion of Kisumu residents suggested that the Handshake was a self-preservation elite pact. Raila’s core political constituents, still hurting and nursing post-presidential election injuries and injustices since 2007, and suffering biting hunger pangs in these economic hard times, have been forced, yet again, to defer their quest for justice and reparations.

Hard feelings, brought about by past betrayals by a cross-section of the Gikuyu elite, the construction of a few road projects, the appointment of a few sons-of-the-soil into public offices, and some subsidy for the beleaguered sugarcane farmers to numb the Luo people’s raw wounds, as they cheat them again, are still very real.

The mixed reactions also revealed a wide gap between the politics that the Handshake enabled at the county level – where incompetent, corrupt, and nepotistic leadership is the name of the game, and where Raila’s hard core support base yearns for a clean and competent government that can deliver healthcare, food, and clean water – and national-level politics, where the very same Raila has been baying for the blood of some of the corrupt, inept and ethnic chauvinists in charge of various ministries.

Drunk with power by proxy

At the county level, the Handshake, it seems, is politics as usual. It starkly reminds Kenyans, especially residents of Kisumu, Homa Bay, Siaya and Migori counties, that their political fortunes or misfortunes since independence have risen or fallen hard with every elite pact, and the ever changing political coalitions, mostly beholden to expedient political interests.

“This time, it’s a call for a big sacrifice from Raila’s political ambitions, an exchange for the quest for justice for the electoral malpractices and victims of police violence, for some ‘development’,” and ultimately, Raila’s quest for the presidency or premiership,” posited Martin Augo.

If Raila’s core support base yearns for competent and accountable county governments is unmistakable, then the Handshake seemed to make such demands only at the national government level, points out Willis Ochieng, a tenderprenuer who has worked in several county governments in western Kenya. “The Handshake,” said Ochieng, “ilituliza joto la siasa, lakini wananchi bado hawana huduma. Ma MCAs, wamesahau hata watu wao kabisa. Wanapigana bunge kujaza mifuko yao tu.” (The Handshake cooled the political temperatures, but the people still lack services. These MCAs have completely ignored the people who elected them. They fight in their respective assemblies to fill their pockets).

In several social media platforms, Kenyans envy the counties that have made remarkable progress and built infrastructure that makes county residents proud, such as the stadium in Kakamega County, the hospital in Makueni County, and the level-six hospital in Kisii County. But hardly anyone envies a hyacinth-free Siaya or Homa Bay or a world class football stadium in Migori. Raila’s strongholds, it seems, have nothing to show for the six years of the devolved government experiment.

One hears only an occasional gnashing of clerical teeth, a dissatisfied Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) Bishop James Ochiel of Southern Nyanza diocese, but hardly a gnashing of the second liberators’ teeth, the custodians of the spirit of the struggle against bad government, among them the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party’s honchos.

Drunk with power by proxy, the party, it seems, is wasting its energy, distracted by chasing “the rat that is escaping a burning house” rather than putting out the fire that is consuming the house. ODM, it seems, reserves its harshest punishment for minnows, inconsequential transgressions and comical infractions, rather than the life-and-death violations of the men-only governors of its core ODM political base – men who, except for Prof Nyong’o, are seen as corrupt, nepotistic, incapable and fantastically generous with cash hand-outs, often given to a few hangers-on as they ride out a lacklustre two-term tenure at the helm of the Homa Bay, Siaya, and Migori county governments.

The ODM mandarins and Raila evangelists would rather they shadow and listen to the double meaning of Aisha Jumwa’s supposed disloyalty and sexed-up taunts of kiuno kiuno (hip gyrations) or “Kanugo e teko,” in Kisumu-speak. Aisha Jumwa’s flaunting of her sex appeal, which seems to gain the ire of the mostly male ODM party honchos, might look comical, but it is a timely reminder than the ODM party leaders may have to work extra hard to keep women’s support. Many women who support the party are hurting and hard done by tough economic times.

No justice for victims of political violence

In Kisumu’s Obunga slum, we sat down with two women outside the aptly named New Obunga Pub, who out of fear of reprisal from ODM Kisumu party hacks requested anonymity. “Risasi oweyo goyo udi wa. tear gas orumo,” (The bullets have stopped hitting our houses and the tear gas is no more), said the lady with a spec of gray hair. “The only respite we have now is that people are no longer running helter-skelter…we, at least, can move freely,” intoned her younger friend. “But there is nothing much else: there is no business, no income, we can’t buy anything because we don’t have the money. You just hustle as hard and kama kawaida (as usual nothing has changed). There is no work for the youth.”

Many, especially women, are still hurting and carrying the scars of the political violence of the 2017 presidential elections. They are also deeply impacted by the tough economic times. “Women were raped. Some lost family members, and although some of the victims formed a support group and were given food at the Kenyatta sports ground, they didn’t get any other help,” said one of the women, a human rights defender, who was hunched over an old model laptop plastered with stickers.

Justice for the victims of political violence has remained a sticky sour question. Unlike their counterparts from Central Kenya, many of the internally displaced people (IDPs) or returnees who came back to Kisumu and neighbouring counties are still waiting for the token financial compensation for the loss of land or livelihood.

The majority of the victims of the recent political violence feel let down by their elected leaders. At best, the elected leaders have been opportunistic and at worst indifferent to the plight of the victims. Shena Ryan, who works with a youth group that runs a charity for the poor living with HIV on the outskirts of Kisumu city, said, “It’s not enough to pay for the funeral expenses and give hand-outs to the bereaved for cheap publicity. A politician’s still a politician, always looking out for cheap glorification.”

Ryan reckons that the Handshake had restored stability, no doubt, because “Kikuyus could now again trade freely in Kibuye. We went to the streets, to protest electoral injustices, and some of us were killed. No one has got justice. They are telling us the OCS Nyalenda will be charged. Until these policemen are charged, it will remain just a narrative.” Said the social worker, “I wasn’t for the Handshake and now, with the knowledge of hindsight, it would have been better had we not poured into the streets. Until the two buffaloes who shook hands come back to the people, purposefully apologise to the victims of the police violence, that Handshake means nothing. Recently, when the duo visited [to attend Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s memorial in Bondo], we were told, ‘Do not heckle Jakom. Who’s Jakom?’” The Handshake has returned us into a one-part state; we are all now in the Jubilee Party.”

In place of the elected leaders, a consortium of civic organisations comprising the Kisumu City Residents Voice, the Kondele Justice Centre, the National Informal Sector Alliance and Kisumu Joint Bunge Initiative, among others, have stepped in to pursue justice for at least 67 people who incurred various bodily injuries, both in the run-up to and after the 2017 presidential elections.

The consortium has petitioned the office of the Chief Justice of Kenya, asking Justice David Maraga to establish a tribunal to look into how security officers singled out and policed Luo Nyanza region during the last general election, to pursue justice for the victims of police violence, and to recommend the prosecution of the police officers who may be found to have been culpable of violence.

Mixed fortunes

Kisumu residents feel that their elected leaders are also indifferent to their economic plight. “Tich tire” (I’m hard at work) says Governor Prof Anyang’, who valorises the Protestant work ethic. But his constituents, such as Willis Ojwang’, retort, “Tich tire; to kech kecho,” (You are hard at work, but hunger bites sting).

Kisumu is no longer stuck in a socialist-like rut of drab municipal and civil service housing, uniformly dull in a state of disrepair, and the old ubiquitous rickety and dusty Peugeot 404 plying the Kondele- Kondele route that were kept on the narrow and badly maintained roads by the combined genius of the city’s mechanics and take-no-prisoners drivers.

The regional marine transport into the port of Kisumu is as good as dead. And the railway tracks are buried deep in the soil. Yet, the urban poor now cruise through the city’s new road networks and underpasses, four or five passengers in a tuk tuk, (rickshaw-type three-wheeler taxis) or as one or two passengers on a boda boda. Its streets, especially in the CBD, all the way to Kisumu International Airport, are well lit at night.

But the city has not yet turned a corner. Its economy is not yet as dynamic as its demography, especially as it draws in other East Africans, such as the Burundians and more Ugandans, who are hawking consumer goods in search of surplus incomes. More than the Protestant work ethic, Kisumu’s economy is in dire need of structural change, the revival of agricultural sectors and ventures into agribusiness, if only to mitigate the widening gender inequality gap and meet the demands of regional integration.

“How can Raila be happy with the Handshake when it has does nothing for us in Nyanza?” posed the women. “At least during the coalition government, the fish factories were revived. The nusu mkate [half bread] government delivered some economic dividends. The recent pact seems to have no economic agenda for the urban poor who bore the brunt of police brutality in the last presidential elections.”

Although the revival of the KBL Kisumu plant held hope for some, the two women we talked to in Obunga complained that the plant employs people from Nairobi, Uganda, Nyakach, and Machakos, not the residents of Obunga as they had hoped. Worse still, for women who have been left out of the city’s better-paying male dominated boda boda and the car wash businesses, the fish processing companies, which used to employ many women directly and indirectly through trading in mgongo wazi (fish skeletons) is closed. “It was big business for all. But with the coming of the Chinese fish, the companies closed. These companies now use their big freezers and cold rooms to store and redistribute Chinese fish,” said one of the women.

“Prostitution is rife here,” one of the women told us. “If you guys stayed a little longer, you’d see a traffic of women moving up towards Kondele, Gwara-Gwara or Ka-Lorry where sex goes for as little Sh20 per shot. What has the Handshake done for us? It has pushed us into sex slavery,” moaned the woman dejectedly as the sun was setting on Obunga slum.

Youth too have missed the BBI boat. If university students’ campus politics is a good indicator for the shifting political alliance, then Kathy Gitau, the articulate, urbane, and charming vice chairperson of the Maseno University students’ council knows all too well how significant local politics, including campus politics, are intricately tied to the centre.

Clutching a long list of names of students who deserve bursaries this semester, which are due for submission, she agreed that the Handshake, “had cooled down political temperatures …brought political stability, freedom of movement, and good working relationship across ethnic divides, and on campus, bridged the ethnic rift between students”, making it possible for her and team to invoke the spirit of the Handshake to canvass for votes. As a coalition of three women and four men, and as a coalition of a Luo (chairperson), a Kikuyu (vice chairperson), a Luhya (treasurer), a Kisii and Turkana, they had been elected.”

Stated Gitau: “Before the Handshake, it was hard for a Kikuyu or Kalenjin to get elected by the students. Ethnic discrimination against the Kikuyu and Kalenjin was rife among students. ‘Why should we give you a piece of cake here when you have the national cake?’ argued the students. Our competence, individuality, strong gender and ethnic balance swept us into office. All candidates in our coalition, except one, were elected. We won by a landslide,” said Gitau.

Still, Ms Gitau had some reservations. The Handshake, she said, “has bridged the divisions among the ordinary citizens who can now interact freely, but it has also widened the rift among the political class. It has killed the opposition. Raila now has a central role in government because he seems to have edged out Ruto. This could, as well, affect us, pitting us in an endless cycle of disputes and divisions.”

She, however, admitted that she still doesn’t understand what the Handshake is all about. “Is it supposed to end in a referendum? If so, how will we participate in a process whose outcome or end game is unknown or seems predetermined? What is in it for the youth? Be that as it may, the Handshake seems to have shifted the focus away from the Big Four Agenda issues of food, healthcare, housing and industrialisation.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant. The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon

In the year 2003, when I was a second-year student at Kenyatta University, news of Dr. Odhiambo Mbai’s assassination broke. It was a time in Kenya when political tensions around constitutional amendments were rising like dark ominous clouds, engulfing the national psyche.

Dr. Mbai was the opposition’s lead in the negotiations that were taking place around the new constitution. It was a quiet day at Kenyatta University before a loud war cry tore through the morning air. Someone must have heard from the news on the radio or watched breaking news on television in the common room that Dr. Mbai had been murdered.

Upon hearing the news, we ran out of our lecture halls onto Thika Road, blocked it, and exploded our anger on innocent unsuspecting motorists. Thika Road was our coliseum, a place where we found some relief from the bloody plays we had with Kenya’s riot police. We needed to be heard by our government, and we were following a script that the government had taught us. To survive, one needed to be faster, more ruthless and more efficient than a government that took pride in its monopoly of corruption and brutality. In the next few days, Thika road would be full of all sorts of debris, blood and tear gas smoke. We wanted to know why Dr. Mbai was killed, and who was responsible. We would have not protested, but Kenya being a place where justice is as scarce as life-saving medicines in public hospitals, we needed to register our anger somehow.

Most of us did not care much about the details of the constitution. It sounded like a bulky document, too complex and beyond the comprehension of the common Kenyan. It was, like any political tussle, defining the fault lines along tribal affiliations. My major attraction to it was that Raila Odinga and many other progressives were behind it. And that Dr. Mbai had paid with his life for it. And that two of my comrades, one from the same hostel as me, had been shot during these riots. In the midst of all the tear gas and gunshots, I knew I was living some realities that I had only watched on television.

In the following weeks, we succeeded in forcing the university to provide us transport to Mbai’s funeral. At the funeral, we were met by multitudes of people mourning in confusion, anger and loss. Many had walked on foot from afar, in the hot tropical sun, to join in the mourning. I am not sure if these personal sacrifices were inspired by a strong sense of connectedness to the struggle or some form of communal kinship.

At the funeral, I ran into my younger brother, who had traveled from Moi University. There was something eerily familiar at this funeral. I felt like I was walking on a path I was aware of, one that my grandparents and parents had walked before. It was one darkened with an engulfing sense of loss and helplessness of an entire community.

I went home later that day and I sought out my grandfather. As an ardent supporter of multi-party democracy, and by extension Jaramogi Odinga and then Raila Odinga, I wanted to hear his thoughts. I was also seeking comfort in his eyes that had experienced similar pain. We would take turns swimming in the sea of communal grief. He counted on his fingers and toes the numbers of young, industrious and pioneering men from the Luo community who had been assassinated since the community migrated with Odinga into the opposition. This decision would start a quest for power and democracy, a quest that would turn the community into a hunting ground for a bloodthirsty government.

***

Prior to Mbai’s death, the concept of being a Luo in Kenya, though occupying most of my early childhood, was abstract. I knew we had issues with the government and we were paying a steep communal price for it. My young mind could glean from the heated political discussions in our household that Luos were engaged in perpetual struggle with powers that were perceived to be the Government of Kenya. I was also aware that prominent members of the Luo community were under active persecution.

In this environment, it was a burdensome task reconciling my national identity with my ethnic identity. Tension was always in the air, in the daily news bulletins, in the local dailies. It was dangling precariously in our household too, ready to drop at the dinner table and explode into emotional political diatribe. I could feel the tension in my father’s vociferous lamentations about the systematic exclusion of Luos from the national government. The people in the government were eating and we were poor. Our time would come. Before that, we needed to consolidate all efforts behind Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and Raila Odinga thereafter. The two were the only anointed vehicles for our economic and political emancipation.

I knew that efforts at consolidating an entire community were met by ambivalence in some sections. The debate about opposition politics being a Luo agenda or the Odinga family’s ambition was a topic that was approached with utmost care, lest one slide and fall into the unwanted pile of traitors. This was a no-go zone unless one wanted to pry open community scars, like Tom Mboya’s assassination. This debate also always ended with someone yelling the word traitor at another person. The same word, traitor, was yelled in our household whenever a Luo accepted a cabinet appointment from President Daniel arap Moi during the infamous one o’clock news bulletin on KBC.

I knew the region we occupied, the vast Luo Nyanza that straddles the shores of Lake Victoria to the sugarcane belt, was deliberately marginalised. The roads were broken, the hospitals bearing the greatest weight of malaria and HIV were subjects of justification by NGOs for grants to save the people. Kisumu residents, seated on the shores of an expansive lake, were thirsty for liberation and for clean water to drink.

One of these traitors was Ojwang’ Kombudo. When Kombudo expressed support for Moi – an action that required public prostration with effusive praises lathering on Moi – he became a traitor. His support for Moi introduced the community to the good life that came with support for Moi, KANU and the government – his constituents in Nyakach enjoyed a short period of piped water and electricity. Like a pimp, Moi had his hand firmly on the Kenyan cookie jar, opening it to dish goodies to his cronies, with the most subservient getting the most, including opportunities to loot public funds.

Kombudo did not last long. In 1992, a wave of opposition gripped Luoland to the last man. Denis Akumu from Ford-Kenya replaced him. President Moi got into a fit of rage, sent government people in uniform to remove water pipes, including the ones that were at my grandfather’s gate. Electricity poles were not spared either. Once again, like a political pimp, Moi and his government were reminding the Luo community of the costs of supporting opposition. The remnants of broken pipes and vandalised water points, including one just near my grandfather’s homestead, serve as a reminder of the costs of voting against the government of the day.

In addition to marginalisation, there were deaths too. The first one I learned of was that of Argwings Kodhek. (I had an uncle named after him though I did not know the weight of memory that the name carried.) I came to learn of its significance listening to the songs of Gabriel Omolo, a popular Luo musician. In a deep sonorous voice, with each beat punctuated with pain, Gabriel mourned Kodhek. As if his lyrics could bring Kodhek to life, Gabriel pleaded with Kodhek’s killers to let Kodhek enjoy the fruits of his toil. It did not help that my grandfather played this song every other weekend before gazing deeply into the landscape of Nyakach – a landscape at the mercy of soil erosion, its nutrients washing away helplessly, just like the Luo community that was getting wiped out by the ferocious forces of multiparty politics and repression.

This would all end. There was a religious conviction that all these sorrows would be magically washed away when one of our own got into power. It was, therefore, imperative that the community united to the last man in support of the Odingas.

The communal wound from Argwing Kodhek’s mysterious death had not yet healed when six months later, Thomas Joseph Mboya fell to an assassin’s bullet in Nairobi. Mboya’s star shone far beyond Kenya. His wide and deep influence was evident in his friendship with influential Americans, such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He was also the first Kenyan to grace the cover of Time magazine in 1960. His assassination, therefore, not only sent shockwaves around the country, but internationally as well.

Within Kenya, Mboya’s assassination sent a chilling reminder to young ambitious people that no one would be spared when Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency was threatened. My grandfather bemoaned how Mboya’s rich connections, as well as his prominence in the government and abroad, could not save him. Mboya’s death continues to be one of the biggest “what if” moments for the Luo community. What if he had lived? What if he had never gone to that pharmacy on Government Road (now known as Moi Avenue)? What if he had joined the opposition with Odinga? The threat was real, whether in government or in opposition. It did not matter where one’s star shone. It only mattered that its shine did not threaten the status quo.

The Luo community persisted after these assassinations. There was a shared belief that Kenya needed change in leadership and assassinations would not break their zeal. The differences between Jaramogi and Jomo Kenyatta continued to fester like a cancerous wound. Four months after the assassination of Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta made a two-day historic official tour of the region, ostensibly to familiarise himself with development projects there. The Luo community, still mourning Mboya, rebelled. Kenyatta’s guards reacted violently, shooting dead 11 protestors.

The extent of communal loss between January 1969, when Argwings died, to Mboya’s assassination in July of the same year and the Kisumu massacre three months later pointed to a systematic attempt at violent subjugation of the Luo community. The occurrences of those days are passed from generation to generation as a slow and painful narration of how the government killed Mboya, then came to our town and killed more when all we needed was to be left alone.

This year marks fifty years since those fateful events. The people who lived through that period, like my grandfather, have very hardened souls and a very strong suspicion of the government. It does not help that during each election cycle, regions occupied by the Luo community become over-policed and over-militarised and young people of the community become fair game when elections results are disputed.

***

I was only six months old when the coup failed. A good number of the soldiers involved were from Nyakach, my maternal grandfather’s home. And their misguided ambition had thrown the community into the dark underbelly of Kenyan politics.

As expected, the failed August 1982 coup entrenched government paranoia of young Luos. President Moi’s government essentially implemented systematic exclusion of young people from Luoland and other communities perceived to be sympathetic to the opposition from recruitment into the police and armed forces. This was a big blow to the quotidian life of the community. In a struggling economy with a rapidly growing population, the armed forces and the police provided sources of income and employment to healthy young people. By blacklisting young men and women from the Luo community, the government imposed a form of official economic depression on this community as an additional tool aimed at forcing them into political subjugation.

There were other deaths of note at the time when Raila was placed in detention after the attempted coup. The most prominent of these in the mid-1980s was that of the Gem MP, Horace Ongili. The immediate former area MP, Otieno Ambala, one of the leading suspects, was arrested and charged with the murder along with six other suspects. However, after a few months in jail, he collapsed and died of a heart attack. There was a feeling within the community and across the country that he too was killed to shield the real killers.

Nonetheless, this tragedy robbed the Luo community of two prominent leaders within a span of six months. This was a scary déjà vu moment, since Kodhek and Mboya had been assassinated approximately six months apart. The community felt that the government was eliminating prominent Luo males or imprisoning them in order to subdue the community’s will to fight. The government seemed to be reading from the same script that the colonialists used against the Kikuyu and other communities fighting for independence in Kenya.

In the early 1990s, as the opposition was gaining a very strong foothold in western Kenya, Dr. Robert Ouko’s star started rising within President Moi’s government. Dr. Ouko’s presence in the government meant that Moi had started looking at Luos in a slightly better light. He began visiting schools and dishing money in big brown envelopes during harambees and to delegations that visited him at State House. The benefits of “having our own” closer to the presidency was becoming evident.

This did not last long. In February 1990, Dr. Ouko was abducted from his home and killed in one of the most gruesome cases Kenya has ever witnessed. The Luo community’s grief was palpable. I was only eight years old and I remember violent riots in the streets of Kisumu. I remember my dad pacing, gesturing and talking with my uncle, who was a university student then, late into the night, angry at something. All universities were closed as rioting students burned their grief and rage in bonfires of lament. When Moi decided that he would forcefully attend Ouko’s funeral accompanied by hundreds of armed riot police officers, university students chanted to Moi, “You killed him, you burnt him, now eat him!” Another prominent Luo, Hezekiah Oyugi, who was the Minister for Internal Security, died in mysterious circumstances two years later, in June 1992. Ouko and Oyugi, like Mboya, were not spared, despite the fact that they were staunch supporters of the government.

In 2007, I directly witnessed loss in the form of post-election violence resulting from disputed elections. My job as a public health researcher in Kisumu exposed me to untold community suffering. In the free medical camps that had been organised by local NGOs, men and women, thousands in numbers, would show up with bodies broken and maimed by bullets. It was like a scene from what I imagined a war-torn country to be. I did not talk about these horrors with my grandfather because they overwhelmed me. They were close, inescapable and frightening.

During the 2017 elections, not much had changed. The violence continued, with over 300 people, even young children, dying from police violence. Several hundreds were shot and maimed too.

A couple of weeks before the August 2017 elections, Chris Msando, an ICT Director at Kenya’s election commission, was abducted, tortured and killed before his body was dumped in a forest. Again, there was another chilling reminder that there was a price to pay by anyone who was perceived to be an impediment to the status quo. This was almost fifty years after Kodhek and Mboya’s assassinations, and targeted killings have not stopped.

***

One of my early childhood memories is when Raila Odinga was released from detention in 1988. As a child, I was fascinated by my grandfather’s surprise that Raila did not die in prison. Most people, having known how ruthless Moi’s regime was, had expected Raila not to survive jail. I could sense massive euphoric relief when Raila walked out of detention alive. My grandfather regaled me with tales of how Raila’s magical powers saved him. How he could turn into a fly on a wall in State House and listen to plans to assassinate him. They said he would then fly back to prison and surprise his killers with his knowledge of their plans beforehand, throwing them into total confusion.

Then there was the swearing-in ceremony of 2018, and the lack of charges against Raila when others like Miguna Miguna continue to be forcefully exiled. Was this also due to Raila’s magical powers? Or was it a result of a savvy politician levering fanatical support from the community as insurance and a bargaining chip for personal political ambitions? This is where the lines get blurred. When we cannot clearly delineate the boundaries of communal ambitions and individual ambitions, it is hard to tell what we are giving our lives for.

And at the end of the road, when we weigh all the losses – both physical and emotional – and place them on a scale, and then measure them against the recent handshake and the public display of brotherly love between Raila and Uhuru, do we see a perfect balance? No, there is no balance. And there will be no restitution. Not even an apology or acceptance of blame for all these deaths.

The weight of communal loss is always borne privately, silently and sometimes in shame by the poor. There are no monuments that can adequately capture all the losses the Luo community have experienced in the last fifty years.

And what if the community would have known that the path to this political and economic utopia could be forged by a handshake? Would the community have protected their youth better? Would they have stopped them from the suicidal choices of fighting with memory, anger and stones on sisal slings? Standing bare-chested before barrels of Kalashnikovs held by government-sponsored killers?

But then again, what options did we as a community have? At the end of the day, we are all Kenyans, burdened by our peculiarities, such as the ability to accept anything and move on to the next tragedy.

That is what happened after the handshake – everyone put a bandage on old and fresh wounds. The magical mantra “accept and move on” is being repeated again and again until everything looks like a distant memory.

But I can’t stop knowing what I know.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon A year ago this month, an unexpected political commotion jolted unsuspecting Kenyans who were still reeling from the effects of two presidential elections that had taken place in a space of just 79 days. These elections had openly split the country into ethnic fault lines that were now threatening to plunge the country into an abyss of anarchy and civil strife.

The 9 March 2018 “handshake” between President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga – pejoratively referred to as “the handcheque” by cynics and Raila’s former front line and hard core supporters, who see the détente between the president and his main rival as the ultimate betrayal – took place against a backdrop of four months of palpable ethnic rivalry and tension that had been simmering since the 26 October 2017 presidential poll, in which Uhuru had essentially run against himself.

When he was sworn in on 28 November 2017, it was evident that President Uhuru did not seem to savour his presidential victory: In the first general election of 8 August, half of the total registered voters of 19.6 million people who cast their votes had voted against him, even as claims of rigging by the opposition outfit, the National Super Alliance (NASA) were rife. On 1 September, the Supreme Court of Kenya overruled the Jubilee Party win, and sued for a fresh presidential election in 60 days – a decision that to date rankles and startles President Uhuru, said a Jubilee Party MP from Central Kenya.

“In a country where the judiciary has always been malleable and at the beck and call of the executive since 1963, it was unheard of that a court would dare rule against the president’s wish,” observed the MP. “It had never happened, hence Uhuru was secure in the knowledge that the court wouldn’t ever dream of ruling against him, just like it hadn’t in 2013. And because African presidents don’t lose elections, at least not through the courts, he did not expect to lose his.”

So, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a repeat election, Uhuru Kenyatta hit the roof and swore against the court’s judges, threatening to “revisit the issue”.

In the repeat October election, Uhuru Kenyatta garnered far less votes than in the August election. Seven and half million people supposedly voted, a figure the MP, now with the knowledge of hindsight, told me was cooked. A majority of Raila’s supporters had boycotted the October election and apathy, fatigue and a don’t-care attitude among Uhuru’s support base ensured that the October election was even less credible than the August one.

The question that has been boggling many Kenyans minds is: What exactly led to President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, two of the bitterest of political rivals, who had left nothing to chance – as one fought to keep the coveted seat of the presidency to himself, while the other hoped to snatch it from the incumbent – to suddenly make peace? Was this a spontaneous reaction of two leaders who had suddenly been imbued with desire to save their country, which was on the verge of ethnic and geographical fragmentation?

The politics of handshakes is not exactly a new phenomenon in Kenya, so this was not a first. Ten years ago, almost to the month, on 28 February 2008, President Mwai Kibaki and his chief political nemesis, Raila Odinga, shook hands on the steps of Harambee House to the great relief of many Kenyans. The 2008 handshake had been occasioned by a hotly disputed presidential vote between Kibaki and Raila, which had driven the country on the precipice of ethnic warfare that had flared in the Rift Valley and in several other parts of the country.

The question that has been boggling many Kenyans minds is: What exactly led to President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga…to suddenly make peace? Was this a spontaneous reaction of two leaders who had suddenly been imbued with an undying desire to save their country, which was on the verge of ethnic and geographical fragmentation?

The truce between Kibaki and Raila was a negotiated peace settlement: both politicians had been encouraged by the chief negotiator, Kofi Annan, and his team to form their own respective negotiators, who then for weeks discussed the modalities of how they would accommodate each other in a government of national unity. And so it came to pass that a government of national unity with Raila Odinga as a non-executive Prime Minister was formed. The process was transparent and Kenyans were kept abreast of the proceeding by the media.

The economic boycott and demands for secession

Fast forward to March 2018. The handshake between President Uhuru and Raila is mired in mystery and subterfuge. Days after the handshake on the steps of Harambee House, a working committee was formed on 24 March to cement the newly found rapprochement, thenceforth referred to as the Building the Bridges to Unity Advisory Task Force, also known as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).

The alleged behind-the-scenes secret talks, political manoeuvres and familial visits soon after Uhuru assumed his second term are as intriguing and interesting as they are revealing. Through wide- ranging interviews conducted through President Uhuru Kenyatta’s intermediaries, Raila’s close confidantes, Deputy President William Ruto’s associates and bosom buddies, Central Kenya and North Rift Jubilee MPs and through my own investigations, I culled an array of information that suggested a presidency in crisis, trapped in a paradoxical pyrrhic victory and a withering state. Then there was a defeated opposition leader who for the very first time in his political career was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and was faced with the devil’s alternative of either quitting politics altogether or re-engineering his ebbing political career. Add to this scenario a scheming deputy president who had already trained his guns on 2022 no sooner had his Jubilee Party won the presidential elections.

Looking back to one year ago, it is as if the clock was ticking and time was not on all of the three protagonists’ side. As one of Raila’s aides said to me: “Raila had come to the late realisation that he would never win the presidential elections as long as the Kikuyus were counting the votes. True, he would force them to spend billions of shillings, but that was just about it. It was about time he recalibrated his political career if he intended to keep it going.”

“Nothing had scared President Uhuru like the NASA’s economic boycott programme and secession talk,” confided one of the president’s friends. Like the Americans would say, Uhuru and his family were “scared shitless” of these two ideas. After opting out of the 26 October fresh presidential election, Raila and his team had come up with a raft of options that were meant to force President Uhuru and his Jubilee Party mandarins to listen to NASA. NASA supporters’ boycott of products made by certain companies associated with the Jubilee Party and resurgent demands for secession by some opposition politicians, particularly at the coast, threatened to tear the country apart – literally.

The most potentially lethal of NASA’s projects was the economic boycott, in which Kenyans of oppositional goodwill were asked to keep away from the Kenyatta family’s businesses and any companies that were either associated with them, or had, in one way or another, presumed to have abetted President Uhuru’s contested win. So, in addition to the family’s large business empire, Safaricom, the largest mobile network company in this part of the world, was on NASA’s radar of companies whose products were to be avoided. The second tier to the economic boycott was a proposal, through the creation of county assemblies in opposition strongholds, for people to decide, whether indeed they wanted to be part of Kenya.

The family business

The biggest Kenyatta family business visible on a daily basis in Kenyan homes is the Brookside Dairy Company. Plutocrats, as well as mainly urban proletariats, use one or more of the several milk products sold under the Brookside label.

Milky tea is consumed widely in Kenyan homes. Drinking a cup of tea is a habit so ingrained in Kenyans’ psyche that it has become second nature for Kenyan families to round off their supper with a steaming cup of tea. It is a habit they picked from the British colonialists, who encouraged tea growing as a cash crop.

With the onset of the boycott, Brookside, a market leader in processed milk, suddenly suffered a steep slump, so much so that Christina Pratt, President Uhuru’s sister, took to visiting various supermarkets, especially in Nairobi, to gauge the daily sales of Brookside products. (I confirmed this in December 2017 when I also did my own survey to measure to what extent the boycott was biting. The French consortium, Danone, had in 2014 acquired a 40 per cent stake in the milk conglomerate through the holding company Brookside Africa Holding Ltd, while Abraaj Group, the Dubai-based private equity firm, had staked a 10 per cent ownership in 2009. Danone is supposed to push Brookside products abroad, hence globalising the Kenyatta family’s business and leveraging its merchandise in a world of cut-throat competition.

“The boycott was a dangerously crippling idea as a political tool, because the Kenyattas’ best-known flagship was going down the drain, right in front of their eyes…something had to be done fast…and done very fast,” said my friend, who works for the Brookside Dairy Company in Ruiru, off the Thika Superhighway. “Let us cut to the chase,” added my friend. “Uhuru Kenyatta is not concerned with the Kenyan nation’s legacy but with the Kenyatta family’s legacy.”

“The family business had to be protected by all means, by any means necessary,” said a Central Kenya MP who is close to President Uhuru. “Instructions from the matriarch, Mama Ngina, to Uhuru and family was that the cardinal rule was to protect the business and not politics per se. In other words, use politics to shield your businesses from external interference or collapse.”

The other issue that terribly worried President Uhuru and his close-knit political cabal was the talk about secession. “It became a terrifying waking nightmare to them, that a section of Kenyans would even contemplate the thought of slicing off the country because of political dissatisfaction,” said the MP. “These were a different type of angry Kenyans, separate from the Kenyans who even when their votes had been stolen in past elections never contemplated going their own away.”

Apart from the Kenyatta family’s business agonies, Safaricom, which NASA and its opposition supporters countrywide had accused of providing servers to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) – servers the election commission to date has refused to open for public scrutiny – was seriously looking to the possible end of its close to two decades of mobile telephony monopoly. Kenyans allied to NASA were furiously opting for Safaricom’s competitor, Airtel. “The Safaricom management team was wailing in its boardroom, wondering what to do, as scores of Kenyans daily migrated to Airtel,” said a Safaricom senior manager to me. “The team called Raila and asked him why he was hell-bent on collapsing the company. Similarly, the team was also piqued by President Uhuru because he seemed impotent in the wake of the economic boycott. They were peeing in their pants, in a manner of speaking.”

The economic boycott, the threats of secession, a withering state, and pressure from Western governments became the push factors that drove the Kenyatta family to initiate a political rapprochement with Raila Odinga, confided an aide to President Uhuru.

The people’s president

Raila, on the other hand, was also undergoing his own political catharsis. “Wherever he went, the people become cantankerous and difficult to calm down: “Hapana…hapana…kula Bible kwanza, kabla hujaongea na sisi” (Swear by the Bible first before talking to us), roared the crowds. Critically, his political career was on the cards, observed one of his aides recently in an interview. “The masses had run ahead of Raila and they were demanding he become their president, failure to which they would abandon him.”

The NASA brigade had decreed that in the light of the contested presidential elections, Raila Odinga would be publicly sworn in as “the Peoples’ President”. He had postponed this once on Jamhuri (Independence) Day on 12 December 2017, and the backlash from his supporters was unmistakable. “If he postponed it again, they were going to have him for supper and that would have been the end of his illustrious political career,” reminisced one of Raila’s aides. “On 30 January 2018, a reluctant Raila was publicly sworn in at Uhuru Park as the Peoples’ President to great aplomb by the throngs of the masses who attended the rally.”

Western countries’ ambassadors and like-minded envoys told Raila point black: “You’ve been appointed the peoples’ president, but know that you’re all alone.” They reminded him of his political stature as one of the country’s leading politicians, his international reputation, and his input of many years in national and global political arenas. They asked him whether he was willing to see all that credibility washed away because of his recalcitrant stance. “Separately, therefore, Raila Odinga was also having his moments of exorcising his demons and coming to terms with the political realities of the day,” observed the aide.

Although the same Western envoys did not rebuke President Uhuru, they nonetheless asked him to map out ways of accommodating and working with Raila. “It was a veiled threat because they let him know that if he failed to do so, they would institute economic sanctions on his regime and make his life as a president keen on a legacy difficult,” confided a foreign diplomat friend who works for the European Union (EU).

Raila Amolo Odinga has paid a huge price for dabbling in national politics: He has been detained for close to a decade by the state. In the 2007 general elections, he saw his presidential victory snatched. In recent times, he has also experienced personal traumas: His first-born son Fidel died in 2015; his daughter Rosemary is recovering from a debilitating sickness (both of these two calamitous situations have been energy-sapping, friends of Raila tell me); and real threats had been made on his life. At 75, Raila is also no longer the youthful adrenaline-driven politician who could pack public rallies and indoor meetings into 18 hours and still spare four hours of just enough sleep to see him through the next day’s political onslaught.

Amid all this, his dutiful wife, Ida, has borne the brunt of his oppositional politics. While Raila politicked, she held the family together, ensuring that politics did not come in the way of the family’s private lives. “But the 2017 presidential elections, his swearing-in ceremony on January 30, and threats on his life had tested her great patience and worn her down,” said a friend close to the Odingas.

Impeccable political folklore has it that it was the Kenyattas who approached the Odinga family for a candid sit-down, said a Central Kenya MP. “With the ongoing threats to their businesses, a wobbly economy and a hollow electoral win, the Kenyattas were in a bad place: they had to reach out to Raila, but only through Ida,” said a source who was privy to the on- goings.

“Before the actual handshake on the material day, President Uhuru and Raila had met for several hours, haggling and going over issues of mutual convergence and interest,” revealed an MP from Central Kenya. BBI has nine points that President Uhuru and Raila agreed to work on. They are: ethnic antagonism and competition, lack of a national ethos, inclusivity, devolution, divisive elections, safety and security, corruption, shared prosperity, responsibilities and rights.

“I remember President Uhuru telling his deputy William Ruto: ‘We’ve to bring on board Raila Odinga, if we don’t, we’ll not be able to govern this country,’” said my source, who is known to both of them. “The only thing that Ruto was not told was when and where the handshake would take place.”

Ruto had run the country between 2013 and 2017, quipped the Central Kenya MP, “and it had been a disastrous affair. Yet both Uhuru and Ruto share blame for running the country down.”

BBI and the Kikuyu-Kalenjin rift

In 2014, a year after Uhuru and Ruto formed the Jubilee government, President Uhuru summoned all Kikuyu MPs to State House and told them that if they needed anything, they should go to the Deputy President. “We must ensure our people trust the DP…you know our people are conservative,” the President is purported to have told the MPs. The two had campaigned on a platform of being the victims of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and therefore had been “joined at the hip” as they canvassed for votes from Kenyans who had been ethnically and emotionally whipped to vote for them.

“In that meeting, Esther Murugi (former Nyeri Town MP) disagreed with the president,” recounted the MP. “‘In Nyeri, we’ve had IDPs [internally displaced people] at Kinoru. Mwai Kibaki [Kenya’s third President] ruled with these people [the Kalenjin] because he feared them,’” said Murugi to President Uhuru. “This is simply untenable.” Three years down the line, Esther Murugi was one of the first Central Kenya MPs to fail to recapture her seat because she did not get the Jubilee nomination.

“Ruto is very vindictive,” the Central Kenya MP reminded me. “He doesn’t forgive: all those people he suspects of having implicated him in the ICC case must be punished.” The MP told me that some of the MPs who failed to bag the Jubilee Party nomination tickets and eventually “lost” in 2017 elections are suspected by Ruto’s people of helping to compile part of the report that incriminated him and sent him to the ICC.

2014 was not the last time that President Uhuru summoned MPs to State House. In August 2017, he met with newly elected Jubilee Party MPs. “He was soaking drunk and he lectured us, as a headmaster would his pupils,” said a first-time MP from North Rift. “Rookie MPs who had never been to State House were excited to be called for the breakfast meeting. But when they were lectured by a drunk president, who was allegedly banging tables, cursing and swearing, they were dumbfounded.”

“Don’t joke with a president who’s not seeking a second term,” President Uhuru is reported to have told the MPs. “I dare anyone who will not do as I say to walk through that door,” he hollered to the now cowed MPs. “Why he was angry, we don’t know. When he finished ranting, the MPs stood up and instead of heading to the laid out breakfast tables, they hastily walked to their waiting cars, and drove off in a huff.”

As fate would it, a few days after that tense meeting, the Supreme Court nullified the election on September 1. “Uhuru once again quickly summoned us to State House: ‘You’ve seen what the court has done to our win’” said a now mellow and pliant president. ‘We need to put our heads together and strategise on how to win the presidential seat again.’ He was now speaking to us in collegial terms – ‘our win’ – the insults and threats had gone, he wanted our help so badly…that’s our President Uhuru.” “A year later, BBI has not communicated the handshake properly to Kenyans,” said my Central Kenya MP friend. “There hasn’t been enough awareness about its real and true agenda and intentions.”

Unlike the handshake of 2008, which was witnessed by, among others, Tanzanian leaders, Benjamin William Mkapa and Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, and the Ghanaian statesman Kofi Annan, the 2018 handshake did little to reduce mistrust or to help build confidence and lend credence to the rapprochement. On the contrary, the 2018 handshake is shrouded in suspicion; many Kenyans believe it has an insidious agenda and most are hard put to explain what it means.

One of the very first things President Uhuru and Raila, now under the auspices of BBI, had planned to do was to visit Central Kenya, as the first entry point of selling the BBI agenda, said the Central Kenya MP. “It was a natural and obvious consequence that BBI seeks to build trust and confidence among these two warring communities, but the visit has remained on the cards, postponed several times.” The MP said Central Kenya has not been in the mood to welcome President Uhuru Kenyatta. “Right now, they don’t feel him, they feel let down by a leader who seem impervious to their economic tribulations. This is what the intelligence reports relayed to the president have been saying.”

But, said the MP, this could all be hot air: “Right now, it’s true they are angry and bitter with muthamaki, so, to project their anger they become emotional and end up saying irrational things like, ‘We’ll vote for William Ruto.’ Kikuyus are the most ethnocentric community in Kenya, and all this bottled-up anger melts on the D-Day [election day]. When they say they’ll vote for Ruto, they mean they’ll vote for him from their houses. No Kikuyu will troop to the ballot booth to line up and vote for a non-Kikuyu presidential candidate – Ruto included.”

Paul Mwangi, one of the joint secretaries (the other is Martin Kimani) to BBI, disputes the assertion that there has been a planned Central Kenya visit from the two leaders that has failed to materialise. “It is not true that the two leaders have been planning to visit Central Kenya. Remember BBI has been holding town hall meetings across the country and it wouldn’t be a great idea to start the visits. For two reasons: one, fear of raising political temperatures and two, fear of misinterpretation of BBI’s work by some MPs, who would want to hijack the BBI’s agenda for their own gain.”

“A year later, BBI has not communicated the handshake properly to Kenyans,” said my Central Kenya MP friend. “There hasn’t been enough awareness about its real and true agenda and intentions.”

Mwangi said BBI had already conducted 18 town hall meetings. “There 29 more to go, it is obvious we’ll not beat the stipulated one year deadline. We’re going to ask for more time from the principals.”

Even with less than half of the counties visited, the emerging theme in these meetings has been – punda amechoka…punguza mzigo (The donkey is overloaded and therefore fatigued…let’s lessen its weight). That is the literal translation. The interpretation is that the voter feels burdened and therefore fatigued by the seemingly overwhelming extra political seats created by the new constitution promulgated in August 2010.

With a ballooning wage bill, and mounting domestic and external debts that have apparently overwhelmed the government, the state has sometimes inadvertently been giving the impression that it cannot deliver development and services to the people because it is having to spend a lot of money paying political leaders. Be that as it may, “BBI is nothing but an entrenched political cabal’s way of controlling national politics and state power so that they remain with the people who have always controlled the two. But more importantly, it is the cabal’s way of ensuring that state power does not land in the ‘wrong hands’’, said a Jubilee MP, who is a friend to both President Uhuru and his deputy. “The Kenyatta family would like to have a political stranglehold on Kenya, the way the Bongo family in Gabon has done.” (Ali Bongo, who has ruled Gabon since 2009, took over from his father, Omar Bongo, who was president for 42 uninterrupted years.)

“BBI’s town hall meetings are supposed to culminate in a referendum and this is where the catch is – it’ll not be by popular vote, but by delegates voting by acclamation,” opined the Jubilee MP. “All these supposed town hall meetings are a ruse: BBI knows what it wants, how it wants it…these meetings are dress rehearsals that are supposed to dupe the people to believe that their voices matter. Carefully selected delegates from 24 counties will be assembled at the Bomas of Kenya for a convention in which they will all unanimously agree to pass the tabled resolutions. That’s how it shall come to be.”

Yet, in a carefully worded rejoinder, Mwangi retorted to the contrary: “BBI has no position on whether or not there’ll be a referendum, that’s a matter that will be dependent on the solutions that BBI will recommend to the principals and where the holding of the referendum will take place will be part of those resolutions.”

The referendum is a must, my sources from Raila’s quarters said to me matter-of-factly. “Raila has indicated there’ll be a referendum this year, it must happen, if it could happen before the population census, the better and he is not bluffing…if it doesn’t take place, he walks away…it is a very serious matter to him.” (The Kenya population census is slated for August this year.)

“We welcome the referendum,” said a North Rift Jubilee MP and one of the DP’s close associates. “We’re not afraid of it. We are going to frame the question differently and better and we’ll be asking Kenyans – kama kweli punda amechoka, (if truly the people are overwhelmed, hence, the demand for a reduction of the constitutional stipulated seats), why then expand the executive? This not our first referendum to engage in…we have been there before and we know how to play the game.”

The Ruto factor

The MP observed that the machinations against Ruto by the so-called “Kiambu mafia” will not work. “Ruto is a hardened and seasoned politician, he has passed through many political tribulations and overcome them. Even this one, he’s going to overcome it.”

The MP pointed out to me that during the August 2010 referendum on the new constitution, in which the Greens supported the new constitution, while the Reds opposed it (with Ruto in the Red corner), “Ruto, even without having money to wage a proper campaign, still gave his antagonists a run for their money.”

Recently, William Ruto’s think tank has advised him to travel abroad and seduce Western countries’ audiences. At a Chatham House lecture on 8 February this year, he supposedly talked tough and even alluded to Raila as a professional perennial presidential loser. These presidential losers are the people who cause trouble in Africa, he is said to have told the audience. After the Chatham House engagement, on 12 February, he dropped by at the BBC’s London offices for the first of his planned media charm offensives – an interview with BBC Hard Talk host Stephen Sackur. Sackur was typically blunt and probing, even suggesting that Ruto was known to be among Kenya’s most corrupt people. The charm offensive obviously failed as Ruto struggled to make his case. But BBI is not the only juggernaut the DP will have to contend with. “Ruto rigged many of the Central and Mount Kenya Jubilee Party MPs that he felt were not on his side, or would be difficult to control, or influence,” said the MP. “He ensured all loyal MPs from his side were handed the certificates easily. That was not the arrangement he had with Uhuru when he was tasked to take charge of the party nomination affairs after the fiasco of the first countrywide nominations trials.”

The MP said that all the former MPs who lost their seats and who are still smarting from their loss loathe Ruto, and are just waiting for the opportune time to strike back. “Yes, they also rail against President Uhuru privately; ‘the man has never been in control of anything.’ They, therefore, have sworn to not support any venture by Ruto. They are adamant they won’t stop saying Ruto rigged them out.”

Among the most hurt of the Mount Kenya politicians who accuse Ruto of rigging them out are: Cecily Mbarire (who ran for the Embu governor seat); Kabando wa Kabando (former MP, Mukurwe-ini in Nyeri County); Martha Karua (who ran for the Kirinyaga County governor’s seat); Mutahi Kagwe (who ran for the senator’s seat in Nyeri County); Ndung’u Gethenji (the former MP for Tetu, Nyeri County); Peter Kenneth (who ran for the Nairobi County governor’s seat); Peter Munya (who ran for the Meru County governor’s seat); Rachel Shebesh (who ran for Women Representative in Nairobi County); and William Kabogo (who ran for the Kiambu County governor’s seat). “Kagwe, Kenneth and Munya are still so angry with Ruto, they won’t even talk to him,” said the MP.

Some of these politicians ran as independents after forming the Kenya Association of Independent Candidates (KAIC) led by Kabogo and deputised by Gethenji. “These are the people who will form the bulwark of opposition to Ruto in the Mount Kenya region. Take it from me, the Jubilee Party, as currently constituted, will not be there in 2022,” said the MP. Hardly surprising in a country where political parties are vehicles for convenience and conveyance and where new parties are formed during every election season.

The Mount Kenya MPs are not only privately accusing President Uhuru of political inaction, “they are also nervous and suspicious of him,” said the MP. “They know President Uhuru, on his own, cannot out-think both Raila and Ruto. They therefore cannot hitch their wagon in his current party. They are also scared of voters’ backlash: it cannot be that the country must be ruled by two communities, passing the presidential race baton to each other, back and forth…that at some point must stop, because it’s unacceptable by all standards.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

BBI: Uhuru Should Heed the Lessons of History

By Nicholas Githuku and Robert Maxon I remember in the 1980s having a great time with friends who were then living at the University of Nairobi halls of residence. A favourite stop-over for drinks was the Serena Hotel. This was the case at least until the price of beer was decontrolled in early 1993. Beer prices shot up and students were forced to humbler watering holes downtown. The Serena proceeded with a decade-long makeover that’s transformed it into today’s five star, increasingly al Shabaab-proof, world class hotel; and captains of industry and tenderprenuers never again had to share the urinals in the evening with opinionated and inebriated first year university students.

The process of decontrolling prices, generally liberalising the economy and politics accelerated exponentially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Successive Kenyan regimes have never been big on the social cost of their policies, but even Moi – with his finger ever on the political pulse of the nation – repeatedly balked when pushed by the World Bank and IMF to liberalise the economy through the 1980s. He was especially wedded to the inefficient parastatals that were highly effective political patronage machines. Indeed, it is ironic that in the 21st century, the National Youth Service, National Cereals and Produce Board, Kenya Power and Lighting Company, Kenya Pipeline Company, Uchumi Supermarkets and other such entities have assumed this mirro-role under the very noses of us Kenyans, and the very same Bretton Woods agencies that pushed for ‘reforms’ through the 1980s and 1990s.

I refer to the decontrol we experienced in the 1990s because it transformed Kenya’s sense of its own political and economic sovereignty. In 2003 when NARC came to power, economic advisors joked that officials at the Ministry of Finance were often bleary-eyed because they only went to sleep after they had checked in with the IMF in Washington. By 2008 Kenya had largely been weaned off its dependence on the architects of the Washington Consensus. It helped that China had dramatically raised its commercial profile on the continent in ways that elites could use to their economic and political advantage.

With this in mind and in hindsight, March was a most interesting month for Kenya. Indeed in just one week a series of events combined to affirm a significant reversal in Kenya’s economic sovereignty with far-reaching implications for our politics.

On the 6th of March, the Minister of Finance, Henry Rotich, made the surprise announcement that the government was ‘broke’. He would deny this a day later in rather incongruous fashion. On the same day he and the Central Bank Governor Patrick Njoroge essentially signed on to an IMF austerity programme.

It wasn’t the traditional IMF programme circa 1980/90s, but it nevertheless was an acknowledgment that we were complying with a range of ‘confidence building’ measures ‘agreed’ with the IMF as we renegotiated our expired precautionary facility with them. For a country like Kenya that has exposed itself to the winds of the international markets to underwrite an ongoing forex-denominated borrowing binge, the IMF’s confidence serves as an insurance to Wall Street that we can, for example, still make our upcoming Eurobond interest payments.

We find ourselves in a conditionality-straitjacket similar to Moi’s in the 1990s. This one may be more politely worded, but the conditions are just as lethal: to secure a six-month extension of the US$ 1.5 billion IMF Stand-by Arrangement, the Fund was demanding that Treasury “[reduces] its fiscal deficit and substantially modify interest controls’. The SBA was due to expire on March 13. Treasury was asking for what was in effect a last-ditch six month extension, to September 2018.

It is thus that the next day, March 7th, the IMF made its ‘end of mission’ pronouncement in Kenya’s regard. Two days later, on the 9th of March, Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga stepped out of Harambee House to their now famous ‘handshake’ that has temporarily reordered our politics. Coincidentally the American Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was visiting Kenya (and being sacked by President Trump at the same time). I should like to speculate that these events are related.

*****

In November 1991, speaking at a donor consultative meeting in Paris, Kenya’s Finance Minister, the late Professor George Saitoti, announced that the KANU regime had agreed to repeal Section 2A of the constitution and allow the reintroduction of political pluralism. Still, the donors imposed an aid freeze on Kenya primarily as a result of the failure of a pre-agreed economic ‘stabilisation’ programme.

In the years up to 1993 Kenya received over US$1 billion per annum in donor aid – most of it at concessionary rates from Western donors. Indeed, in 1989/90 Kenya received US$1.6 billion from them. And the year before in 1988, KANU had scrapped the secret ballot, holding elections where voters queued behind their candidates. So this aid wasn’t linked to our deteriorating politics then. As a result, the aid freeze of 1991 was not only economically traumatic, the trauma was also political. At the time our understanding was that Moi had caved into intense domestic and international pressure for political and economic liberalisation. That Saitoti chose to make the all-important announcement while facing donors, however, was itself significant. Some insiders at the World Bank at the time insist that Moi misread the moment. The World Bank and IMF had primarily been pressuring Kenya on the economic reform front. It was the bilaterals who had suddenly become more eager about progressive political change. Indeed, from the mid-1980s the regime had agreed to liberalise the economy which meant doing away with a range of parastatals (that at one point employed over 50 percent of civil servants); and the removal of foreign exchange and price controls, among a raft of other measures.

Initially the government acquiesced to the demands on the understanding that they would be implemented gradually. This was articulated in Sessional Paper No.1 of 1986. The subtext of the reforms would lead to the dismantling of President Moi patronage machine – it was, essentially, political suicide. So he dragged his feet. But then the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Moi’s backers in the West, the US and UK in particular quickly started speaking a new language. Ambassadors who had never publicly agitated for transparency, human rights, good governance, accountability – the buzz- words of this new dispensation – when Kenya was a ‘pro-Western anti-communist bastion on the Eastern side of Africa’ suddenly changed their tune. President Moi criss-crossed Kenya complaining about this betrayal and warning that multipartyism in Kenya’s tribal context would lead to division and violence.

Faced with an aid freeze and under enormous pressure to liberalise both the economy and politics, Moi’s grudging acceptance of both was accompanied with his signing off on the Goldenberg scheme that promised to avail the much needed foreign exchange necessary to keep things going through the crunch and finance the 1992 multi-party elections. Thus the Goldenberg scandal was born. The people who walked Goldenberg into State House were the country’s long-serving spy chief, James Kanyotu, and his co-director in Goldenberg International Ltd, Kamlesh Pattni, a 27-year old small- time jeweller. The latter had been trying to flog the scheme to mandarins for some time without success. Now it was eagerly snapped up and transformed into the single most intense conflagration of political corruption in the country’s history.

Kenya saw 10 percent of GDP (US$1 billion at the time) extracted by the Goldenberg scams. The late Kanyotu had saved Moi’s bacon a couple of times before, notably in 1982 when he rushed to the Nyeri Agricultural Show on Friday July 30th to warn the President that Air Force officers were planning a coup and seeking permission to arrest them. Moi refused and the coup attempt took place that Sunday 1st August 1982. Moi in 1991, presented with a solution, did not hesitate to take it.

The people who walked Goldenberg into State House were the country’s long-serving spy chief, James Kanyotu, and his co-director in Goldenberg International Ltd, Kamlesh Pattni, a 27-year old small-time jeweller. The latter had been trying to flog the scheme to mandarins for some time without success. Now it was eagerly snapped up and transformed into the single most intense conflagration of political corruption in the country’s history.

*****

Kenya came out of a failed election process last year with a regime devoid of legitimacy; an economy steeped in debt and hobbled by a wild cycle of looting; an emboldened opposition speaking for almost 70 percent of the country and resolutely implementing a political programme Jubilee couldn’t respond to without a campaign of violence that threatened to burn the entire house down.

For Uhuru Kenyatta, the start of 2018 presented an almost insurmountable set of challenges: implementing an austerity programme while having to deal with a focused opposition breathing down his neck. But he had one thing Moi didn’t have in 1991: the support of both the West and the Bretton Woods institutions. As sub-Saharan Africa teeters on the brink of another debt crisis, the IMF has been generally silent, as even status-quo Western development economists are beginning to question the wisdom and sustainability of the debt binge numerous developing countries have embarked on over the past decade. Here in Kenya David Ndii has been flagging the issue for six years non-stop.

It is probably pure coincidence that the March 9th ‘handshake’ between Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta that relieved so much political pressure from the Jubilee regime came at a moment when Kenyatta needed all the economic wriggle room that the crisis could allow. But just as in Moi’s case in 1991, the handshake deal was fronted, not by the usual political or bureaucratic types, but by the men from the shadows who give advice on matters of national security and preservation of the regime. Indeed, the politicos and bureaucrats were largely cut out of the handshake arrangement. On every side many seemed as surprised by it as most Kenyans. Add to this the fact that the appointed interlocutors are Mr. Odinga’s lawyer, Paul Mwangi, and Dr. Martin Kimani, the head of counter terrorism.

I have argued before that Kenya’s elite has often been most amenable to giving up political ground when they are in a fiscal bind. Considered together the political and economic events of March are interesting in their similarities, no matter how apparently tenuous, to the situation in 1991 when Moi reached out to his friend and spy chief (who retired that same year), to sort out the mess of having to win a multi-party election at any cost and finding the resources to do it in the middle of an aid freeze. Kenyatta is attempting to manage his own succession with the economy in a mess; the politics polarised but opposition demobilised for now; and, in the midst of a looting spree that makes Goldenberg look like a minor hold-up in a corner shop. Behind it all one cannot help that feeling that, as they say, ‘we just got owned!’ Literally in our case as Kenyans.

(Research by Juliet A. Atellah)

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.